Wicca is a modern pagan, witchcraft religion that was developed in the mid-20th century. The exact year of its development is a matter of debate, but it is generally believed to have emerged in the late 1940s or early 1950s. It was created by Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant, who claimed to have been initiated into a witchcraft coven in the New Forest region of England. Gardner began promoting his version of witchcraft, which he called Wicca, in the 1950s through the publication of books and the establishment of covens. Wicca draws inspiration from ancient pagan religions, particularly those of Europe, and incorporates ritual magic and reverence for nature. Wiccans worship a Goddess and a God, who are seen as representing feminine and masculine energies respectively.
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Such media attention attracted many people and led to a whole network of covens springing up around them, although longer-established Gardnerian Wiccans denounced Alex as a charlatan. For example, The Great Charge , rewritten by Doreen Valiente from earlier versions, focuses specifically on the goddess as the embodiment of nature, and is one of Wicca s most well-known liturgical texts.
Wiccans worship a Goddess and a God, who are seen as representing feminine and masculine energies respectively. Today, Wicca has grown into a widely practiced religion, with various traditions and lineages. Its followers celebrate seasonal festivals, perform rituals, cast spells, and strive to live in harmony with nature and the cycles of the Earth.
WICCA
WICCA . Wicca originated in 1940s England as an attempt to recreate what was believed to be an ancient religious system indigenous to Britain and Europe, characterized by the veneration of nature, polytheism, and the use of magic and ritual. It was heavily influenced by the occult revival of the late nineteenth century, including secret, magical societies such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (established in 1888), the notorious magician Aleister Crowley (1875 – 1947), Freemasonry, and Spiritualism. The rediscovery of classical ideas of nature and deity in Romantic literature and archaeology provided additional sources, as did British folklorist and Egyptologist Margaret Murray's (1862 – 1963) "anthropological" study of witchcraft in Europe, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921). These threads were woven into early Wicca by Gerald Brosseau Gardner (1884 – 1964), a British civil servant who had spent much of his working life in the Far East and had a lifelong passion for folklore and archaeology, visiting many sites of archaeological significance on travels to the Near East. Gardner returned to England when he retired in 1936, living in London and the New Forest before moving to the Isle of Man in 1954. Once back in England, Gardner, already a Freemason, joined the Folklore Society, the Co-Masons, the Druid Order, and the Rosicrucian Fellowship of Crotona. This latter group, he claimed, contained a hidden, inner group of hereditary witches who initiated him in 1939. They also allegedly allowed Gardner to publish their rituals in fictional form in his novel High Magic's Aid (1949), which he wrote under the pseudonym Scire. Gardner was not able to publish more open accounts of witchcraft under his real name until the 1736 Witchcraft Act was repealed in 1951 and replaced with the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which gave freedom for individuals to practice witchcraft as long as no harm was done to person or property. Released from a law that subjected any person alleged to have magical powers to prosecution, Gardner wrote Witchcraft Today (1954), which contains an introduction by Margaret Murray, followed by The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), taking both himself and witchcraft into the public spotlight. In Witchcraft Today Gardner set out his belief that witchcraft was not only the original indigenous religion of Britain, dating from the Stone Age, but that it had survived the persecutions of the Great Witch Hunt in early modern Europe, continuing in secret but now threatened with extinction. These claims followed closely Murray's thesis that an old religion involving worship of a horned god representing the fertility of nature had survived persecution and existed throughout western Europe. Murray argued that the witch-cult was organized in covens that met according to the phases of the moon and the changing seasons, conducting rituals that involved dancing, feasting, sacrifices, and ritualized sex in honor of the horned god. Later, in The God of the Witches (1933), Murray traced the development of this vegetation god and introduced the idea of a fertility goddess into the cult. Gardner's absolute belief in and perpetuation of Murray's argument led many early Wiccans to believe that they were continuing this ancient tradition of witchcraft, although scholars had refuted the validity of her use of trial records since The Witch Cult was first published and dismissed most of her evidence over time. Most, though not all, Wiccans today acknowledge that there is little evidence for a continuous, pre-Christian witchcraft tradition indigenous to western Europe, but Gardner's aim of reviving what he believed to be a dying religion appears to have been fulfilled. His numerous media appearances brought Wicca to public attention throughout the 1950s, during which time he encouraged people to set up covens operating according to the outlines in his books and initiated many people into Wicca. One of these was Doreen Valiente (1922 – 1999), one of the key figures in modern Wicca. She worked with Gerald Gardner as his high priestess and revised the Book of Shadows, a book of rituals, information, and lore for which he claimed ancient provenance, which she felt to be too influenced by the writings of Aleister Crowley. Valiente eventually left his coven in 1957, after falling out with him over ever-increasing publicity seeking, and periodically withdrew from the public face of Wicca throughout her life. She was nevertheless consistent in her support for what she termed the old pagan religions: in 1964 she was president of the Witchcraft Research Association, she was a founding member of the Pagan Front in 1971, and in November 1998 she spoke at the annual Pagan Federation conference in London. Her life within Wicca, witchcraft, and paganism is documented in many of her books, including The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989), Witchcraft for Tomorrow (1978), and Witchcraft: A Tradition Renewed (1990, with Evan Jones). Another key figure is Patricia Crowther (b. 1932), who was initiated by Gerald Gardner in 1960 and established covens in Yorkshire and Lancashire. She was an actress and dancer whose husband, Arnold Crowther, was an old friend of Gerald Gardner. Patricia Crowther is the author of a number of books on witchcraft, including Lid Off the Cauldron (1981) and her autobiography, One Witch's World (1998), published as High Priestess: The Life and Times of Patricia Crowther (2000) in the United States. In the early twenty-first century, she continued to run a coven in Sheffield, and it was an ex-member of her coven, Pat Kopanski, who was instrumental in the initiation into Wicca of Alex Sanders (1926 – 1988), who developed a second branch of Wicca in the 1960s. Sanders was a resident of Manchester who claimed a witch ancestress from Snowdonia, in North Wales. His branch of Wicca was based on Gardnerian lines, but Alexandrian Wicca, as it came to be known, was more heavily influenced by ceremonial, ritual magic — Sanders worked for the John Rylands library in Manchester, where he read classical texts on ritual magic, and he had been trained as a medium through visits to a Spiritualist church with his mother during childhood. In 1961 Sanders allegedly wrote to local Wiccans whom he had seen on television, but they took a dislike to him, and it was apparently not until 1963 that he was initiated into Wicca by a priestess in Derbyshire. Sanders went on to act as high priest to a coven in Nottinghamshire, but the group dissolved in 1964, and he then met the seventeen-year-old Arline Maxine Morris (b. 1946). They began running a coven together in 1965, were discovered by a local newspaper, and went on to manipulate the media to such an extent that they became the most famous witches in the world by 1966. Such media attention attracted many people and led to a whole network of covens springing up around them, although longer-established Gardnerian Wiccans denounced Alex as a charlatan. Like Gardner, Sanders sought publicity for Wicca, often of a sensational nature, and by the 1970s he had become known as the King of the Witches. In 1967 Alex and Maxine Sanders moved to London, and in 1969 Alex Sanders was sensationally publicized in a newspaper article. This article led to many media appearances, a romanticized biography, King of the Witches, by June Johns (1969), and a film, Legend of the Witches (1969), as a result of which Alexandrian Wicca grew exponentially. In 1973 the relationship between Alex and Maxine broke down, and they divorced in 1982 but remained friends. While Maxine continued to run the coven, Alex retired from the limelight to Sussex, where he continued to teach Wicca until his death from lung cancer on Beltane Eve 1988. He was also a prolific initiator, and many covens in Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in northern Europe sprang from visits to him during this period. A number of the Sanderses' initiates — particularly Stewart Farrar (1916 – 2000), Janet Farrar, and Vivianne Crowley — have been responsible for writing extremely influential books on Wicca. Stewart met Alex and Maxine Sanders while working as a journalist in 1969 and was initiated by Maxine in 1970. He and Janet ran their own coven in London, married in 1974, and subsequently moved to Ireland in 1976. Here, they continued to train and initiate people in Wicca and became prolific Wiccan authors whose many books include What Witches Do: A Modern Coven Revealed (1971), Eight Sabbats for Witches (1981), The Witches' Way (1984), The Witches' Goddess (1987), The Witches' God (1989), Spells and How They Work (1990), and, with Gavin Bone, The Pagan Path (1995) and The Healing Craft (1999). The Witches' Way contains the bulk of the contemporary Gardnerian rituals and was published with the active help of Doreen Valiente, who wrote most of them and had herself made a large amount of material available in her 1978 book, Witchcraft for Tomorrow. It thus made the core ritual format and texts of Gardnerian Wicca available to all. After Stewart's death, Janet married Gavin Bone, and they continue to initiate, write, and speak at pagan conferences. Wiccan priestess, psychologist, and university lecturer Vivianne Crowley was initiated into both Alexandrian and Gardnerian Wicca, and in 1979 she founded a Wiccan coven that combined the two traditions. In 1988 she founded the Wicca Study Group along with her husband, Chris, and it is now Europe's largest Wiccan teaching organization. She is a member of the Pagan Federation council, serving as honorary secretary (1988 – 1994), prison chaplaincy coordinator (1991 – 1995), and interfaith coordinator (1994 – 1996). Crowley has a doctorate in psychology and has trained in transpersonal counseling with the Centre for Transpersonal Psychology in London. Her books include the best-selling Wicca: the Old Religion in the New Millennium (1989; 1996), Phoenix from the Flame: Pagan Spirituality in the Western World (1994), Principles of Paganism (1996), Principles of Wicca (1997), and A Woman's Guide to the Earth Traditions (2001). Wicca is not, however, confined to northwestern Europe. It has become a global phenomenon and can be found in most countries populated by people of European descent, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. It has spread through such people as Ray Buckland, an initiate of Gerald Gardner, who subsequently emigrated to the United States in 1967, taking Gardnerian Wicca with him. Buckland later became disillusioned with the perceived hierarchy in Gardnerian Wicca and went on to form a more egalitarian tradition of Wicca, which he called Seax, or Saxon Wica [sic]. He is the author of several do-it-yourself guides to Wicca, including The Tree: Complete Book of Saxon Witchcraft (1974). The explosion in how-to books on Wicca since the 1980s and, more recently, internet sites has become the main means by which Wicca has spread and grown, evolving and at times mutating quite dramatically. During the late 1970s and 1980s, for example, a further important development in Wicca took place as the feminist consciousness movement influenced the emergence of feminist Wicca and witchcraft in North America. The Hungarian-born American feminist activist Zsuzsanna Budapest was one of the prime movers behind the development of feminist witchcraft, forming the women-only Susan B. Anthony Coven, running a shop called The Feminist Wicca in California, and self-publishing The Feminist Book of Light and Shadows (1978). The book was a reworking of available Gardnerian Wicca, which excluded all mention of men and male deities and included her own rituals, spells, and lore. It was later expanded and published as The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries in 1986. Starhawk (Miriam Simos) (b. 1951) is one of the most prominent feminist pagan activists in the United States. Her feminist activism in the 1970s led her to the Goddess movement, and she studied feminist witchcraft with Budapest and Faery Witchcraft with Victor Anderson. After practicing as a solitary, Starhawk formed Compost, her first coven, from participants in an evening class on witchcraft and then a second, Honeysuckle, for women only. She was elected president of the Covenant of the Goddess in 1976 – 1977, published her first book, The Spiral Dance, in 1979, and was one of the founders of the Reclaiming Collective in San Francisco in 1980. The Spiral Dance has proved to be an ever-popular volume since it was first published in 1979, selling over 100,000 copies in its first ten years of publication. The book is based on Anderson's Faery tradition but incorporates strictly feminist principles into modern witchcraft, principles that are expanded in her later books Truth or Dare (1987) and Dreaming the Dark (1988). Starhawk combines nature worship, politics, activism, psychology, and goddess worship in an attempt to heal spiritual and political divisions in society and individuals. Such themes come out even more strongly in her two novels, The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) and Walking to Mercury (1997). European Wiccan attitudes towards Starhawk's redirection of witchcraft toward political activism tend to be cautious. Recently, Starhawk has actively reclaimed her Jewish roots as well as being a witch, an exploration that has led to her sometimes referring to herself as a "Jewitch." The religion described by Gardner and developed since the 1950s positions nature as central, through deities representative of nature and rituals associated with seasonal change, and through the growing concern for the environment since the 1970s. Although some versions of feminist Wicca focus exclusively on the divine female, perceptions of deity in Wicca are directly linked to nature and are generally regarded as empowering for both men and women, since they include both goddesses and gods. For example, The Great Charge, rewritten by Doreen Valiente from earlier versions, focuses specifically on the goddess as the embodiment of nature, and is one of Wicca's most well-known liturgical texts. It describes the goddess as "the beauty of the green earth, the white moon among the stars, the mystery of the waters" and as "the soul of nature who gives life to the universe." Her counterpart is Lord of the Greenwood, Sun King, Corn King, Leader of the Wild Hunt, and Lord of Death, a god intimately connected with nature represented through the seasonal cycle of festivals. Each year most Wiccans celebrate eight festivals, known as sabbats; these make up a ritual cycle known as the Wheel of the Year. Four main rituals are celebrated at the four seasonal festivals described by Murray as the witches' sabbats and based on the agricultural year. These are Candlemas on February 1, May Day on May 1, Lammas on August 1, and Hallowe'en on October 31. During the 1980s these festivals became Celticized as a result of the Farrar's relocation to Ireland and North American interest in Celtic ancestry; they thus tend now to be known as Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh, and Samhain respectively. The four other festivals that make up the Wheel are astronomically fixed: the Winter and Summer Solstices around December 21 and June 21, and the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes around March 21 and September 21. The Winter Solstice is often called Yule and, particularly in North America, the Summer Solstice tends to be called Litha, with the equinoxes known as Ostara (Spring) and Mabon (Autumn). At each of the festivals, deities are addressed in aspects appropriate to the season. For example, at Hallowe'en or Samhain, gods and goddesses associated with death and the underworld such as Hekate, Hades, Rhiannon, or Anubis might be addressed, as Wiccans celebrate death as part of the cycle of life and seek to prepare themselves for the dark winter months ahead. The Wiccan sabbats are intended to deepen the participants' understanding of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth as revealed in the changes evident in nature, for deities, humans, and the natural world are all seen as interconnected. For this reason many Wiccans living in the Southern Hemisphere have reversed the festivals. For example, Summer Solstice rituals take place on December 21 to celebrate the fullness of life reflected in nature at that time of the year in such countries as in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Most Wiccans live in urban areas, and rituals that celebrate nature and venerate nature deities help them to feel more in touch with the natural world. This, along with a rise in active concern for the environment since the 1970s, has been a major reason for the growth in popularity of Wicca and Neopaganism in general throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. However, Wiccans demonstrate a range of attitudes toward protecting the natural world, from radical environmentalism and direct protest to more abstract views derived from the idealized nature of Romanticism or from Western esotericism. In the latter, nature is a reflection of a greater divine reality, being at once both an intermediary between humanity and divinity and being imbued with divinity itself. Thus, environmental activism does not necessarily follow from a ritual or spiritual engagement with nature, although this is often the case in North American Wicca as practiced and taught by Starhawk, for example. Nature, and Wiccans' understandings of it, are extremely complex; one cannot assume that Wicca and environmentalism go hand in hand. Such complexity is evident in the diversity of Wiccan traditions that have emerged around the world. Practices borrowed from Native Americans have been adopted and adapted by Wiccans in North America, for example, while many European Wiccans turn to Saxon, Celtic, or Germanic traditions, seeking inspiration from the supposed indigenous traditions of northern Europe. The classical pagan cultures of Greece, Egypt, and Rome are also mined for inspiration. Feminist witchcraft has had a great impact on Wicca in North America, which has then spread to New Zealand and Australia, but has been less influential in Britain, where the Gardnerian and Alexandrian traditions remain strong. Nevertheless, the multitude of North American Wiccan derivations — including Starhawk's Reclaiming, Faery Wicca, Dianic Wicca, and Seax Wica — have crossed back to Europe, and Starhawk's version in particular has grown in popularity because of its stress on political and environmental action. Wicca has no centralized, institutional structure, and Wiccans have only a few beliefs to which they all adhere. These include the Wiccan Rede or Law — "Do what thou wilt an it harm none" — and the Law of Threefold Return, which states that whatever a person does, for good or ill, will return to them threefold. The lack of any central organizational structure allows for an enormous level of variety, and Wicca at the beginning of the twenty-first century looks likely to retain its complexity and differentiate further as it continues to spread and grow.
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Reviews for "Decoding Wicca: Uncovering the Development of the Craft"
- John - 2 stars
I found "In which year was wicca developed" to be a boring and uninformative book. The author seemed to lack a deep understanding of the topic and the writing style was dry and monotonous. I was looking for a more in-depth exploration of the development of Wicca, but this book only scratched the surface. Overall, I was disappointed with this read.
- Sarah - 1 star
"In which year was wicca developed" was a complete waste of time. The information provided in the book was scarce and poorly organized. It felt like the author rushed through the topic without providing any real substance. The writing style was also dull and unengaging, making it difficult to stay interested. I would not recommend this book to anyone looking to learn more about the development of Wicca.
- Mark - 2 stars
I was excited to read "In which year was wicca developed" as I wanted to deepen my knowledge on the subject. However, I was disappointed with the lack of research and analysis presented in the book. The information provided felt shallow and incomplete, leaving me with more questions than answers. I would have preferred a more comprehensive and well-written exploration of the development of Wicca.
- Emily - 3 stars
While "In which year was wicca developed" had some interesting points, overall, I found it to be a mediocre read. The author touched on the development of Wicca in a superficial manner, leaving out crucial details. Additionally, the writing style was dry and lacking in creativity. I think there are better books out there for those looking to learn about the origins of Wicca.