Is Wicca the most ancient Religion, or indeed, a surviving pre-Christian witch-cult dating back thousands of years? Wicca’s founding father, Gerald Gardner, used a thesis by Dr Margaret Murray that witches are the modern remnants of ancient Pagans. Historians have looked at this claim and found no supporting evidence. So academics view Wicca as a fascinating modern, reconstructionist religion that is polytheistic, nature-centred and has been growing and evolving since the ‘50s. And it is not restricted to Wicca, the religion has been influential in the growth of Paganism and related belief systems around the world.

Summary

Is Wicca the most ancient Religion, or indeed, a surviving pre-Christian witch cult dating back thousands of years?

Is the Wiccan tradition ancient or modern? This and more in today’s episode!

Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a Religious Studies PhD and your online resource of information based and backed by peer-reviewed studies and academic scholarship.

Let’s talk about Wicca now and how old it really is! Wicca is a nature-worshipping, nature-centred religion that emerged in the 1950s, claiming to be the surviving tradition of a pre-Christian witch cult. Now – premising that the antiquity of a religious tradition has nothing to do with its validity, its value, and the transformative power it has on the lives of practitioners – Historians have disproven the claims put forward by Gerald Gardner. Wicca is, in fact, a modern religion inspired by pre-Christian, non-Christian and Pagan practices, beliefs and traditions. Yet, in how it appeared to us, it’s framed and it is structured, is decisively modern and – especially in its inception – rooted in ceremonial magic.

Garner’s belief in Wicca being an ancient pre-Christian surviving cult draws heavily on the theories of the controversial Folklorist, Anthropologist and Egyptologist Dr Margaret Murray of University College London. Two of her books were extremely influential in the formation of modern Witchcraft, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology, first published in 1921, and The God of the Witches, which followed ten years later in 1931.

Margaret Murray’s books are not good history but represent a selective representation and interpretation of the facts. Her thesis, which Gerald Gardner was later to adopt, was that the witches persecuted in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century witch trials in Europe and the United States were not devil-worshippers, or the victims of society’s hysteria and paranoia, but were Pagans who worshipped the Horned God and practised magic. In Murray’s view, theirs was a cult which derived directly from an ancient Paganism which had co-existed secretly with Christianity with little active persecution until the witch trials. Moreover, it was protected by those in high places. Many of the English kings were said by Murray to have been sympathetic to the Pagan cause if not active leaders of it.

For Margaret Murray, Witchcraft (she does not use the word ‘Wicca’) involved rain-making and fertility rituals. It was much like any tribal culture she would have studied as an anthropologist. She writes of familiars, the Horned God, coven leadership and discipline (here seen as male-led), and Witches’ death and rebirth myths. Witchcraft is a fertility cult which worships a dying and resurrecting God.

Thus, we can confidently assert that Wicca sees its origins in the early decades of the 20^th century among those esoterically inclined Britons who wanted to revivify the beliefs of their ancestors. Wicca then entered the public sphere in the 1950s and the 1960s, thanks to a few followers who decided to publicly share their religious beliefs in a hostile world to such a different belief system. Crowley, 1998)

What are your thought about the antiquity of Wicca, and why does it matter to you how old a religion is? I’m curious! Let me know in the comments!

Now let’s talk about the term Wicca and the history of its usage.

The ‘founding father’ of modern Wicca was Gerald Gardner, a colonial administrator with a long-standing interest in folklore and naturism. Upon his return to England when he retired in the 1930s, Gerald Gardner claimed to have made contact with a group of people practising Witchcraft. The Witches met in the New Forest in Hampshire in a small group, a coven, with a system of initiation not dissimilar to the three degrees of Freemasonry. The group practised activities traditionally associated with witchcraft such as casting spells, but these were for beneficial and altruistic purposes.

The Witches also worshipped their Gods through seasonal rituals. A strong distinction was made between Witchcraft and Satanism. The Witches did not consider themselves to be Satanists or to be members of an anti-Christian cult; rather they claimed to be Pagans, worshippers of pre-Christian deities, the keepers of the ‘Old Religion’, whose ancestors had practised Paganism underground and secretly for centuries since its suppression by the Christian Church.

Regardless, however, of whether he was reviving an ancient tradition or launching a new religion, Gerald Gardner’s books and in particular “Witchcraft Today” (1954) succeeded in spawning a Wiccan movement which has spread firstly into other English-speaking countries — the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; secondly into countries such as the Netherlands and Scandinavia, where his books have been readily accessible because English is widely used as a second language; and more recently, from the early 1980s onwards, into countries such as Germany, where Gardner’s works and those of his successors have been translated. (Hutton, 2019, p. 252)

Another key figure in the early development of Wicca was Doreen Valiente, who read a piece on Wicca in Illustrated which led her to meet Gardner in 1952. The meeting must have gone pretty well as Doreen Valiente was initiated about a year after her encounter with Gardner and started a fruitful partnership with him becoming thereafter an influential member and popular writer who contributed significantly to the spreading of Wicca. (Doyle White, 2016, p. 2)

Later on, Wicca spread in the United States, finding a fertile environment in the 1960s counterculture taking root in the country. It became particularly popular among the women’s and gay liberation movements seeking spiritual liberation from the Christian hegemony. After reaching a wider audience as an alternative to the dominant religious system, it came to target teenagers through books and television shows which captured the attention of a younger audience.

The lively history that Wicca has had in less than a century makes it an extremely fascinating new religious movement which keeps growing and evolving, having a significant impact on other nature-worshipping and witchcraft-oriented religions.

So even though the claims of it being extremely old and dating back to Christianity in a continuous line are historically unfounded, Wicca is still extremely interesting as a religion both from an anthropological point of view, for us scholars, and from the point of view of practitioners because there are an increasing number of people who identify as Wiccans and as Pagans and their perception of Paganism was massively influenced by Wicca. Among Religious Studies scholars we tend to think of religion and, of course, there is a variety of takes on what religion is, but many scholars would argue that religion is a system of belief-making and meaning-making that enriches people’s lives. So it is important for me to clarify the lack of a long historical line underlying the Wiccan tradition does not imply that it is any less relevant, any less valid or any less authentic as a religious movement.

So I hope that this video helped clarify things. And in case you were already aware of this information I hope that it provided you with some academic resources for you to check out and dive deeper into the topic.

Angela’s Symposium is a project of delivering scholarly, academic information freely for anybody to watch that is funded by you guys. So if you have the means and can help this project keep going, I would really appreciate it if you could consider supporting this project with a one-off PayPal donation, by joining Memberships, or my Inner Symposium on Patreon. We have a discord server, a book club, monthly lectures, one-to-one conversations with me, and lots of things depending on your chosen tier. And if you did like this video don’t forget to SMASH the Like Button. Subscribe to the channel, activate the Notification Bell because I’d really love for you to be notified when I upload a new video so that you do not miss out. Share this video with anyone who might be interested in the topic and is wondering whether Wicca is an old religious movement or a new religious movement. Thank you so much for being here and stay tuned for all the Academic Fun.

Bye for now.

REFERENCES

Crowley, Vivianne (1998), ‘Wicca as Nature Religion’ in Pearson, J.; Roberts, R. H.; and Samuel, G. (eds.), Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 170-179.

Doyle White, E. (2016) Wicca: History, Belief, and Community in Modern Pagan Witchcraft, None edition., Brighton, Chicago, Sussex Academic Press.

Hutton, R. (2019) The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Oxford University Press.

First uploaded 13 Jan 2023