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Wicca

An earth-centered Neo-Pagan religion, often referred to as "White Witchcraft," "the Craft," "the Craft of the Wise," or "the Way of the Goddess."   Wicca is a reconstruction of the religions and practices of pre-Christian peoples, usually the Celts, and incorporates ritual magick and herbalism into its practices.   While most Wiccans refer to themselves as Witches, they are quick to point out that their religion does not include any worship of or any belief in the Christian Satan.   Rather, they worship a God and a Goddess, archetypal embodiments of both the feminine and masculine divine, and incorporating the many gods and goddeses of various mythologies, especially nature deities.   These deities and the natural forces they represent are honored in seasonal ceremonies, Sabats, held on 1 February (Candlemas), 30 April (Beltane), 31 July (Lammas),  and Halloween, as well as the equinoxes and solstices.  Lesser ceremonies, esbats, are sometimes observed during the new and full moons.   While Wiccans believe in and use magick and spells, as a rule they refrain from "hexing" or cursing anyone, in keeping with a karmic principle known as The Threefold Law, according to which one's actions are reflected back three times over.   Wicca is one of the fastest growing religions, especially in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Australia.

Wicca's origins can be traced to the great surge of interest in occultism, mysticism, folklore, and spritualism of the late nineteenth century, as represented by the Theosophy movement and magickal fraternal societies like the Order of the Golden Dawn.   Amid this interest Charles G. Leland, a British folklorist, published a book in 1899 entitled Aradia, the Gospel of the Witches.   This book purported to be an account of the legends and traditions of the stregora, or Italian witches, and claimed that the tradition traced back to Etruscan times.   The folk religion was centered around the worship of Tana, an Etruscan version of Diana or Artemis, and her consort Lucifer the morning star (not the Christian Devil), and was said to be dictated to the stregora by Tana's daughter Aradia.  While debate still continues over the authenticity of Leland's work, the fact remains that it was the first modern-day suggestion that witchcraft might be practiced as a pagan religion and not a Satanic cult.

In the 1920s, influenced largely by Leland's work, British anthropologist Dr. Margaret Murray conducted her own research into the accounts of the witchcraft trials and executions of the medieval and Renaissance periods.   Her conclusions, published as The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, were that witchcraft was indeed being practiced in Europe at that time, but also that it was not a Satanic cult but a folk religion dating back to pre-Christian times, involving the worship of a Pan-like Horned God which the Christians had incorrectly identified as the Devil.   Though her work has since been criticized for faulty research methods and a willingness to accept at face value accounts made by accused witches under torture, it was at the time hailed as a breakthrough in historical research, and Dr. Murray was even  invited to write an essay for the Encyclopedia Britannica's entry for "Witchcraft," which was included until the 1980s, when it was replaced by one highly critical of both Dr. Murray's theories and the practice of Wicca.

The true impact of Charles Leland's and Dr. Murray's work came in the 1940s, when a British civil servant by the name of Gerald Gardner published a novel entitled High Magic's Aid, which detailed pagan magickal rituals conducted by a modern witch coven.   Following the 1950 repeal of the Witchcraft Act, which had made claims to being a witch or otherwise having supernatural abilities an act of fraud, Gardner published Witchcraft Today, a detailed guide to the practice of modern Witchcraft in which he himself claimed to be a witch and to belong to a coven dating back to the Middle Ages.   He stated that Leland and Murray were perfectly correct in stating that Witchcraft was a nature-oriented religion which dated back to pre-Christian times.   Gardner also gave a name to the religion, Wicca, which he claimed was derived from an Anglo-Saxon word for wisdom.   A complete religious system for Wicca was detailed, identifying both a God and Goddess, rituals, rules, and observances.   Gardner claimed that these had all been taught to him by the witch who first initiated him, and it was only with her permission that he had written and published the book.   Most now believe that Gardner in fact had simply styled himself to be a witch, and had devised his Witchcraft system himself, using the works of Leland and Murray as sources, as well as borrowing elements and ideas from the magickal doctrines of Aleister Crowley and the Order of the Golden Dawn,  the mythological and folkloric theories of Robert Graves and Sir James Frazier, old magickal texts or grimoires, the rites and practices of the Gurkhas he had lived among during his years in India, and even elements of naturism, of which Gardner was a practitioner.    While it may have been an accepted part of dogma in years past, very few Wiccans today accept the notion of their Craft as having an unbroken lineage to ancient times, but instead recognize their religion as a modern reconstruction of ancient practices.

The 1960s, marked by a wide-scale rejection of convention and the status quo, saw a tremendous growth in the practice of Wicca and its introduction into the US and Canada, where its nature-oriented practices and liberal attitudes towards nudism and sex meshed well with the growing culture of individual freedom, environmentalism, and free love.   New systems of Wicca, all based in part on Gardner's system, began to appear, introduced by Alex Saunders, Raymond Buckland, Leo Martello, and Sybil Leek, among others.   In the 1970s the gay rights movement provided a new audience for the Craft, as Wicca's rejection of Christian dogma resonated with people persecuted largely because of conservative society's interpretation of Judeo-Christian sexual moraes.   Arthur Evans and others used Wicca to add a spiritual element to their activism, laying the foundations for what later became the Radical Faerie  Movement.    In 1971, combining elements of Wicca with feminist philosophy, Z. Budapest created her own tradition of Dianic Wicca.    An explosion in growth came in the 1980s, with the publication of  Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon, an overview of Neopaganism in the US and Canada,  Starhawk's The Spiral Dance, which emphasized more than ever before the practical and philosophic elements of Wicca, and numerous magickal "recipe books" by Scott Cunningham.    This period also saw an increase in activism among Wiccans, especially with regards to religious tolerance, feminism, gay rights, and environmentalism.

Wicca continues to grow today, especially among young people and in the gay community.   While some Wiccan groups reject homosexuality, citing God/Goddess duality, the vast majority are accepting of gays and lesbians, and some covens even incorporate transvestism into their rituals.    The lesbian characters Tara and Willow on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer are identified as Wiccans, though the witchcraft they practice is far removed both in practice and reality from the Wicca that is practiced in the real world.    Despite its large and growing following, and even its inclusion in handbooks for clergy in the military, Wicca continues to struggle for recognition as a religion and with attacks from the religious right, who continue to incorrectly identify Wicca with devil worship.   Even current US President George W. Bush, as Governor of Texas, was once quoted as saying he did not consider witchcraft to be a religion.   None of this, however, has hurt the religion as a whole, and its growth and increasing exposure and acceptance continue unabated.

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