The Occult

Origins of Modern Witchcraft

Witchcraft & Wicca · 11 min read

Modern witchcraft did not appear out of nowhere in the middle of the twentieth century. The religion that Gerald Gardner began to publicise in 1949, and the broader currents of folk magic, ceremonial magic, and Romantic scholarship that fed it, had been gathering for at least two hundred years. The history has, in the words of the historian Ronald Hutton, “two competing stories” at its heart: a story of unbroken survival, in which the old religion was secretly kept alive through the centuries of persecution, and a story of romantic reconstruction, in which the modern witch religion was largely built by scholars, folklorists, and magicians of the early twentieth century working from fragments of older material. Both stories are partly true, and the tension between them still shapes the field.

This article traces the strands that came together: the survival of folk practice across early modern Europe, the rise of folklore as a discipline, the Romantic rehabilitation of the witch, the influence of ceremonial magic and the Golden Dawn, the founding of Wicca by Gardner and his circle, the repeal of the British Witchcraft Act, and the explosion of traditions that followed Gardner’s death in 1964.

The question of pre-Christian survival

The most enduring question in the history of modern witchcraft is whether the contemporary religion preserves a continuous tradition reaching back into pre-Christian Europe. The dominant view in academia, and the view now accepted by most serious Wiccan and witchcraft historians, is that no such continuous tradition can be demonstrated. The historian Carlo Ginzburg, in The Night Battles (1966; English 1983), did more than any other single scholar to dismantle the older assumption that the trials had been the persecution of an organised religion. Ginzburg’s research on the benandanti, peasant spirit-fighters of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Friuli, showed that the inquisitors were not confronting a real cult but constructing, through leading questions and torture, a stereotype of witchcraft that the accused then partially internalised.

This does not, however, mean that nothing survived. Local folk practices — herbalism, “cunning craft” traditions, the use of charms and protective signs, midwifery, the celebration of seasonal festivals at farms and holy wells — continued across Europe well into the modern period. The historian Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), documented in extraordinary detail the persistence of magical practice in early modern England; the folklorist Cecil Williamson, who worked with Gardner in the 1940s and 50s, collected similar material in the West Country. The American folklorist Vance Randolph, in his Ozark Magic and Folklore (1947), did the same for the Appalachian and Ozark traditions. These were not a single religion, and they were not practised in secret, but they did carry a stock of pre-Christian imagery and seasonal observance forward.

The wider scholarly position, articulated most influentially by Ronald Hutton in The Triumph of the Moon (1999), is that what we now call modern witchcraft is a genuine religious innovation of the early twentieth century, but one that drew on a richer vein of genuine folk tradition than earlier sceptics had allowed. The “old religion” did not survive in the form Gardner claimed, but the soil from which it grew was real.

The folklorists and the Aradia gospel

The study of folklore provided one of the modern witchcraft revival’s most important sources. The Brothers Grimm in Germany, the folklorists of the British Folklore Society founded in 1878, and American folklorists working in the Appalachians all collected charms, songs, plant-lore, and seasonal customs that would later feed into the witchcraft movement.

The American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland published Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899), a collection of Tuscan folk-magic material cast as a witches’ gospel. Leland claimed to have received the material from a hereditary Italian witch, Maddalena Talevi (“Mara”), working in the Mugello region of Tuscany. Whether Leland substantially authored the text himself has been a matter of scholarly dispute since the 1890s. Carlo Ginzburg, in Storia notturna (1989), and the folklorist Sabina Magliocco have both treated Aradia as a Leland construction more than a record of authentic Italian witchcraft. Aradia nevertheless became a founding text of modern Wicca: the Charge of the Goddess, the most recited liturgical text in Wicca, draws heavily on Leland’s gospel.

In the British Isles, the folklorist Cecil Williamson collected rural magical traditions in the 1940s and 1950s, established the Museum of Witchcraft on the Isle of Man (later moved to Boscastle, Cornwall), and worked closely with Gerald Gardner. Williamson’s collections remain a useful resource on British folk magical practice.

Margaret Murray and the witch-cult hypothesis

The British folklorist and Egyptologist Margaret Alice Murray (1863–1963) made the most ambitious claim, in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1933), that the European witch trials were the suppression of a pre-Christian fertility religion. Murray’s hypothesis, almost universally rejected by historians today, nevertheless shaped the imagination of the early witchcraft revival and provided the religion with a usable past. Murray’s influence on Gardner was direct: the structure of the early Wiccan coven was consciously modelled on her account.

By the 1960s the academic reaction to Murray was well advanced, led by historians such as the Oxford scholar Christopher Hill and the folklorist Elliot Rose. Diane Purkiss, in The Witch in History (1996), and Julian Goodare, in his editorial work on the Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (2013), represent the consensus: the Murray thesis is now a useful but discredited piece of speculative history.

Ceremonial magic and the Golden Dawn

The second major stream feeding modern witchcraft was ceremonial, or “high”, magic. While the folklorists were collecting charms and herb-lore, the late nineteenth-century occult revival in Britain, France, and Germany was producing a much more elaborate tradition of ritual.

The most important organisation in this revival was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888 in London. The Golden Dawn synthesised Christian Cabala, Hermetic philosophy, astrology, tarot, and Egyptian religion into a comprehensive system of initiation and ritual. Its members included W. B. Yeats, A. E. Waite, Florence Farr, and, most importantly for the witchcraft story, Aleister Crowley, whose borrowings from Golden Dawn ritual structure would eventually surface, indirectly, in Wicca. For the broader history, see the history of the occult.

Crowley’s influence on Gardner was direct and personal. Gardner and his wife Edith (known as “Dafo”) were members of the Ordo Templi Orientis in the late 1940s, and several passages of early Wiccan liturgy are recognisable reworkings of Crowley’s “Gnostic Mass”. The Great Rite has obvious antecedents in OTO practice. Later Wiccans, led by Doreen Valiente, would clean up the Crowley-derived material, but the structure of circle, quarter, and invocation owes a clear debt to ceremonial magic.

The New Forest coven and the founding myth

The single most controversial piece of the modern witchcraft story is Gerald Gardner’s claim to have been initiated in 1939 into a surviving coven in the New Forest area of Hampshire. According to Gardner, this coven preserved an ancient tradition going back to pre-Christian times, and his religion was, in effect, the public face of that tradition.

There is no independent documentary evidence for the New Forest coven. Gardner never named his initiators, the alleged coven produced no other written record, and the demographic and historical details of his account are not internally consistent. The most thorough scholarly examination, by Ronald Hutton, concluded that the coven was almost certainly a fiction constructed by Gardner, drawing on members of his own circle, on ceremonial-magic material Gardner had access to, and on the Murray thesis. Aidan Kelly, in his 1991 Crafting the Art of Magic, has reconstructed the Bricket Wood coven of the late 1940s in some detail; that coven is real, but it is not the New Forest coven.

Whatever its historical status, the coven story gave Gardner the standing to teach, and the early rituals of the Bricket Wood coven, with their Gardners, the Valientes, the Bucklands, and others, formed the core practice of what would become Wicca. For more on Gardner and the Wiccan liturgy, see Wiccan beliefs and practice.

The 1951 repeal of the Witchcraft Act

A legal change made the new religion possible. From 1735, English law had criminalised the pretence of exercising witchcraft under the Witchcraft Act of that year. The 1951 Fraudulent Mediums Act repealed the older statute and replaced it with a much narrower law aimed at commercial fraud. Almost immediately, books on witchcraft began to appear: Gardner’s Witchcraft Today was published in 1954, and within a few years the press was full of witchcraft titles. The repeal was a necessary precondition for the rapid growth of the religion in the 1950s and 1960s. The 1951 Act itself has now been repealed in turn, by the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 — a slow legal recognition that the older statute was no longer fit for purpose.

The explosion of traditions after Gardner

After Gardner’s death in 1964, the religion he had founded diversified rapidly.

Alex Sanders (1926–1988) claimed hereditary initiation and founded Alexandrian Wicca in the early 1960s. Sanders’s tradition closely resembled Gardnerian Wicca but was somewhat more ceremonial in flavour, drawing particularly on Kabbalah and the Golden Dawn. His partnership with his wife Maxine Sanders, who published Alex and Maxine Sanders: King and Queen of Witchcraft (1983), made the tradition a public feature of British witchcraft.

Doreen Valiente, having largely withdrawn from coven leadership in the late 1950s, continued to write and to define the religion’s self-understanding. Her 1978 book Witchcraft for Tomorrow set out a vision of Wicca as a continuation of pre-Christian nature religion that has shaped the movement’s self-image ever since. Her 1989 The Rebirth of Witchcraft is the standard insider account of the early Gardnerian period.

Raymond Buckland brought Gardnerian Wicca to the United States in 1962 and later developed the Seax-Wica tradition. Buckland’s Long Island and New Hampshire covens trained a generation of American Wiccans.

In continental Europe, the revival took different forms. In France, Gérard Encausse (Papus) had already founded the Martinist Order in 1891. In Italy, the Roman traditionalist religion of Stregheria was publicised by Leo Martello and Raven Grimassi, and traced its lineage to the benandanti documented by Ginzburg. The folklorist Éva Pócs has documented the persistence of folk-magic traditions in Hungary and the surrounding regions. These continental currents did not always converge with the Anglo-American revival, but they are part of the broader history.

The Faery tradition, distinct from Wicca, was founded by Victor Anderson (1917–2001) and carried forward by Gwydion Pendderwen and, later, Starhawk. It is shamanic, animistic, and centred on personal contact with the spirits of the land. Starhawk’s Reclaiming tradition is its best-known descendant.

The American witchcraft renaissance

American witchcraft in the 1970s developed along several distinct lines, often in tension with one another.

Paul Huson’s Mastering Witchcraft (1970) presented a witchcraft that was explicitly ceremonial, drawing on the medieval grimoires, the Key of Solomon, and the Goetia. Huson’s witchcraft was a craft of sigils, circles, and conjurations.

Sybil Leek’s autobiographical Diary of a Witch (1968) and her American television appearances made her the most visible witch in the United States for a brief period. Leek projected an image of the hereditary English country witch; her actual initiation was Gardnerian.

Starhawk (Miriam Simos) published The Spiral Dance in 1979, a feminist, ecological, and political witchcraft that drew on Gardnerian ritual structure but recast it in a key of goddess-centred, earth-honouring, and activist spirituality. Starhawk’s Reclaiming tradition, founded in California in the late 1970s, is one of the largest organised currents in contemporary witchcraft. The folklorist Chas S. Clifton’s Her Hidden Children (2006) is the standard scholarly study of the American revival.

Z Budapest founded the first women-only Wiccan coven in the United States in 1971 and developed a Dianic witchcraft that centred the Goddess and made women’s experience the central ritual and theological focus.

Scott Cunningham popularised a Solitary Wicca in books such as Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner (1988), which made the practice available to readers without access to a coven. Cunningham’s Eclectic Wicca, more than any other single book, defined the way most American Wiccans now practise.

The Faery tradition, distinct from Wicca, was founded by Victor Anderson (1917–2001) in the 1950s and carried forward by Gwydion Pendderwen and, later, Starhawk. It is shamanic, animistic, and centred on personal contact with the spirits of the land.

Limitations and unresolved questions

Three live disputes mark the history of the modern witchcraft revival. The first is the question of how much of Wicca is genuine survival and how much is innovation; the dominant view, articulated by Hutton, is that Wicca is a genuine religious innovation that draws on older folk material, but the older claim of unbroken survival has not entirely gone away. The second is the dispute between Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca on the one hand and Traditional Witchcraft (Robert Cochrane, Andrew Chumbley, the Clan of Tubal Cain) on the other. The Traditionalists argue that the Gardnerian tradition is essentially a Golden Dawn construction; the Gardnerians argue that Traditional Witchcraft is a more recent invention. The dispute has been going on since the 1960s. The third is the question of whether Wicca is one religion or many: the sociologist Margot Adler, in Drawing Down the Moon (1979, revised 2006), treated the diversity as a single, pluralist movement; Hutton, in The Triumph of the Moon, has been more cautious, treating Gardnerian, Alexandrian, Dianic, Reclaiming, Eclectic, and Traditional Witchcraft as distinct traditions that share a family resemblance but not a common theology.

Sources and further reading

  • Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999; revised 2019). The standard scholarly history of the revival.
  • Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present (Yale University Press, 2017).
  • Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (3rd ed., Routledge, 2015).
  • Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles (Johns Hopkins, 1983) and Ecstasies (Penguin, 1990). The microhistorical work that dismantled the Murray thesis.
  • Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971).
  • Margaret Alice Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford, 1921). Read as a cultural document.
  • Charles Godfrey Leland, Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899; many reprints).
  • Doreen Valiente, The Rebirth of Witchcraft (Hale, 1989) and Witchcraft for Tomorrow (Hale, 1978).
  • Aidan A. Kelly, Crafting the Art of Magic (Llewellyn, 1991).
  • Chas S. Clifton, Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (AltaMira, 2006).
  • Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (Viking, 1979; revised Beacon, 2006).
  • Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).