The Occult

Wiccan Beliefs and Practice

Witchcraft & Wicca · 11 min read

Wiccan practice is, at its root, a religion of reverence: for the natural world, for the cycle of the seasons, and for the practitioner’s own responsibility to act with care. The details vary enormously from one tradition to the next — Gardnerian, Alexandrian, Dianic, Reclaiming, Eclectic, Solitary, and Traditional Witchcraft each interpret the central doctrines in their own way — but a recognisable set of moral teachings, ritual structures, and liturgical objects runs through the religion. This article sets out what those things are, where they come from, and how they fit together in the working life of a Wiccan.

The Wiccan Rede

The most quoted piece of Wiccan moral teaching is the Rede. In its most common English form it reads, “An it harm none, do what ye will.” The word rede is Old English for “counsel” or “advice”, and the Rede is best understood as a counsel rather than a commandment.

Its history is shorter than is sometimes claimed. The exact formulation “An it harm none, do what ye will” appears in the 1974 “Rede of the Wiccae” by the American initiate Adriana Porter, published in the esoteric periodical The Green Egg; a near-identical phrase, “If it harm none, do what ye will”, appears in Doreen Valiente’s Witchcraft for Tomorrow (1978). The Rede’s striking resemblance to the Thelemic “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” of Aleister Crowley’s Liber AL vel Legis (1904) is not accidental; Gardner’s circle was well read in Crowley, and several Wiccan moral formulations are recognisable reworkings of Thelemic themes.

The Rede is not, on most Wiccan readings, a license to do anything that does not visibly damage another person. It is read as a counsel of restraint combined with a counsel of self-knowledge: the only free act is the act one can take responsibility for, and the only safe freedom is a freedom exercised without harm.

The Rede is often paired with the Threefold Law, the principle that the energy of any act, for good or ill, returns to its source three times. The pairing is a feature of the Eclectic and Solitary Wicca of the 1980s and 90s; classical Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca tend to be more cautious about formulating ethical rules and to emphasise the personal responsibility of the witch and the discipline of training. The historian Ronald Hutton, in The Triumph of the Moon (1999), has argued that the Rede is best understood as a Wiccan restatement of older common-sense moral traditions rather than as a doctrine of specifically Wiccan provenance.

The Threefold Law

The Threefold Law of Return, sometimes called the Law of Three, is a folk-etiquette rule that the energy of any act returns to its source magnified threefold. The doctrine is associated in modern usage with Raymond Buckland (in Witchcraft from the Inside, 1971, and The Tree, 1974) and with the Eclectic Wicca of the 1980s, but its roots lie in the broader European folk belief in the return of magical acts. The folklorist Sabina Magliocco, in Witching Culture (2004), has traced similar ideas in Italian and Appalachian folk practice. The Threefold Law is not, in the strict sense, a doctrine of karma, which is a distinct teaching from Indian religions with its own philosophical basis. Many Wiccans find the rule useful as a discipline; some, particularly in the more initiatory traditions, treat it as a folk belief that the religion has inherited rather than a precise metaphysical claim.

The Horned God and the Triple Goddess

Most Wiccan traditions are duotheistic, honouring a divine pair: a Goddess and a Horned God. The Goddess is often conceived in three aspects as the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, corresponding to the waxing, full, and waning moon. The triple form is the contribution of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1948) to Wiccan theology; it is not, despite frequent claims to the contrary, a survival of any attested pre-Christian cult.

The God is a horned, antlered, sometimes ithyphallic figure: consort of the Goddess, lord of the wild, the forest, the dying year, and the underworld. He is not, in Wiccan theology, the Christian Devil, and the Wiccan defence of him has long included a pointed observation that the medieval identification of the Devil with a horned god was itself a kind of theological slander. The folklorist Carlo Ginzburg, in Ecstasies (1989), has documented the long history of this identification in the European witch trials.

The names given to the deities vary by tradition. Gardnerian Wicca tends to use the titles “Lady” and “Lord” rather than named deities; Alexandrian Wicca sometimes draws on Greek or Egyptian pantheons; Dianic and Reclaiming traditions centre the Goddess and may treat the God as a partner figure; Traditional Witchcraft may work with local land-spirits and ancestors rather than the Wiccan Horned God at all. Eclectic Witches may keep personal pantheons, drawing on Cernunnos, Aradia, Diana, Brigid, Pan, the Horned God of the Forest of Broceliande, and many other figures.

The elements and the quarters

Wiccan ritual is structured around the four classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water, and around a fifth, non-elemental “spirit” at the centre. The four cardinal directions — north, east, south, and west — are associated with earth, air, fire, and water respectively, following the standard Golden Dawn assignment that Gardner’s circle inherited. The directions are typically invoked at the start of a rite with a short call such as “Hail, guardians of the watchtowers of the North.”

The casting of the circle is the central act of Wiccan ritual. The priestess (or the priest, or the practitioner) traces a circle on the ground, often with an athame or a wand, and the working group enters it. Inside the circle, time is set apart: the elements are invoked, the gods are called, the working is performed, and the circle is released. This is essentially a ceremony of ritual and ceremonial magic, a Western esoteric tradition in which circle, quarter, and invocation are central.

The Wiccan arrangement of the elements on the altar follows the British Traditional assignment. Earth is in the north (the place of stability, of midnight, of winter); air in the east (the place of dawn, of spring, of thought); fire in the south (the place of noon, of summer, of will); water in the west (the place of sunset, of autumn, of feeling). The fifth element, spirit, is at the centre, sometimes represented by a candle or a small cauldron.

The Wiccan tools

A traditional Wiccan altar is laid out with a small set of ritual tools, each with a specific symbolic role. The classical British Traditional Wiccan assignment, which is the most widely used in Wiccan practice, is the following.

The athame is a ritual knife, usually black-handled, double-edged, and never used to cut physical objects. In the British Traditional Wiccan convention, the athame represents the element of fire and the active, projective side of magic. The bolline, by contrast, is a white-handled working knife used to cut herbs, cords, and candles. The distinction between the two knives is a feature of British Traditional Wicca, and not all Witches maintain it. (The Golden Dawn’s ceremonial assignment, in which the dagger corresponds to air, is the source of some confusion; the British Traditional Wiccan convention is the standard one in Wiccan circles.)

The chalice is a ritual cup, usually containing wine, mead, or water, representing water. The wand is a length of wood used to project energy and draw the circle; in the British Traditional convention, the wand represents the element of air.

The pentacle is a disc, often of wood or metal, inscribed with a pentagram, used to represent the element of earth and to lay consecrated objects upon. The pentacle is distinct from the pentagram, the five-pointed star; see sacred symbolism and geometry for the wider meaning of these signs.

Other common tools include a censer for incense, a cauldron, candles, cords for binding, and a besom (ritual broom). Most Witches also keep a Book of Shadows.

The High Priestess and the High Priest

In the initiatory Wiccan traditions, a coven is led by a High Priestess and a High Priest. The High Priestess is the presiding officer of the rite, the channel for the Goddess, and (in most initiatory lineages) the source of authority. The High Priest is her consort and the channel for the Horned God. The pairing is not merely administrative: it mirrors the divine pair of the religion and the symbolism of the Great Rite.

In a Gardnerian coven, the High Priestess must be a Third-Degree initiate, having passed through First, Second, and Third Degrees over a period of typically a year and a day between each. The coven is led in the priestess’s name, and the priest derives his authority from her. The female-led structure of the British Wiccan traditions is unusual in Western religion; its origins are partly in Gardner’s high estimation of the priestess’s role and partly in the ceremonial-magic tradition of the Golden Dawn.

Eclectic, Reclaiming, and Dianic traditions have developed different models of leadership, often more collective, more political, and less tied to a single ordained authority. The sociologist Margot Adler, in Drawing Down the Moon (revised 2006), has documented the variety of these models across the American Wiccan revival.

Initiation and degree

Classical Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca are initiatory religions, organised in three degrees. First Degree marks the entry into the religion; Second Degree confirms the witch in their practice; Third Degree confers the ability to initiate others and to lead a coven. There is typically a year and a day between each degree.

Initiation is a private ceremony, performed within a cast circle, and traditionally bound by oath of secrecy. The candidate is blindfolded, measured, marked, and bound. The ritual is derived, in its broad outlines, from the older Masonic and ceremonial-magic initiations, and it works a kind of symbolic death and rebirth.

Not all Wiccans follow this initiatory model. Solitary Wicca, Eclectic Wicca, and many forms of Reclaiming and Dianic witchcraft do not require initiation by another person; the witch may self-initiate, often at a sabbat, with a ceremony they have written for themselves. The self-initiation model is, in the long view, a development of the 1970s and 1980s, and it has substantially expanded the reach of the religion.

The Book of Shadows

Every Wiccan tradition has, as its central document, a working book of ritual. In Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca this is the Book of Shadows, a hand-copied collection of the rituals, the Charge of the Goddess, the laws, and the central texts of the tradition. Different lineages have slightly different books, and many Witches keep a personal Book of Shadows in addition to, or in place of, the inherited one. For a fuller treatment, see what is a Book of Shadows.

Drawing Down the Moon and the Great Rite

Two rites lie at the heart of Wiccan practice. The first, the Drawing Down of the Moon, is a ritual in which the High Priestess, standing within the circle, receives the Goddess into her body. The priest invokes, the priestess becomes, and for the duration of the rite she speaks and acts as the Goddess. The ritual is among the most powerful in the Wiccan repertoire, and it is one of the most thoroughly documented of Gerald Gardner’s contributions to the religion. It appears in Witchcraft Today (1954) and in the published Gardnerian Book of Shadows.

The second is the Great Rite, the symbolic (and in some traditions, literal) sexual union of priestess and priest, often performed by the descent of the athame into the chalice. Most Wiccan covens perform the Great Rite symbolically, with the athame and chalice standing in for the bodies; some, especially in the older initiatory traditions, may perform it in actuality within the circle.

Both rituals are best understood in their ceremonial-magic context. Drawing Down the Moon is a form of invocation, the Western esoteric art of inviting a god or spirit to inhabit a human vessel. The Great Rite is a form of sexual magic. Both have older antecedents in ritual and ceremonial magic, and the Wiccan versions sit comfortably in that wider tradition.

Common misunderstandings

A few common misunderstandings about Wiccan belief and practice are worth addressing. The first is that Wiccans worship the Devil: the Wiccan Horned God is not the Christian Devil, and the Wiccan defence of him has long included the observation that the medieval identification of the Devil with a horned god was, as the Wiccan priestess Vivianne Crowley has put it, “a slander upon an older religion”. The second is that Wicca is feminist by definition: some Wiccan traditions (Dianic, Reclaiming, some strands of Eclectic) are explicitly feminist, but Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca are not, in their classical forms, feminist traditions; they are duotheistic and have male priests as well as female. The third is that Wicca is a survival of an ancient religion: the mainstream scholarly view, articulated by Ronald Hutton, is that Wicca is a genuine religious innovation of the early twentieth century. The fourth is that Wicca is a single, centrally organised religion: it is not. There is no central authority, no common scripture, and no agreement on doctrine across the traditions. Wicca is, in the strict sense, a family of related religions that share a common ancestry in Gardner’s Bricket Wood coven.

The cycle of the year

Wiccan practice is also shaped by the year. Most traditions observe the eight sabbats of the Wheel of the Year, the four solar holidays of the solstices and equinoxes, and the four cross-quarter days. The eight-sabbat calendar is itself a modern construction, codified in the 1950s and 60s, and the names “Mabon” and (in the Wiccan context) “Ostara” are 20th-century coinages. The cycle is real for modern Wiccans; the claim that it is ancient is, as Hutton has shown, anachronistic.

Sources and further reading

  • Gerald Gardner, Witchcraft Today (Rider, 1954). Gardner’s own account of the religion he founded.
  • Doreen Valiente, Witchcraft for Tomorrow (Hale, 1978) and The Rebirth of Witchcraft (Hale, 1989). Valiente’s account of the early Gardnerian period and her own revisions.
  • Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford University Press, 1999; revised 2019). The standard scholarly history of the modern revival.
  • Vivianne Crowley, Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium (Thorsons, 2002). A sympathetic insider account by a Wiccan priestess.
  • Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon (Viking, 1979; revised Beacon, 2006). The classic American sociological study.
  • Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). The standard ethnographic study.
  • Scott Cunningham, Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner (Llewellyn, 1988). The defining text of Eclectic Wicca.
  • Starhawk, The Spiral Dance (Harper & Row, 1979; revised 1989, 2019). The defining text of Reclaiming Wicca.
  • Aidan A. Kelly, “The Bricket Wood Coven and the Gardnerian Book of Shadows”, in The Pomegranate 16 (2014), and Crafting the Art of Magic (Llewellyn, 1991).
  • Chas S. Clifton, Her Hidden Children (AltaMira, 2006).