The Occult

Witchcraft and Wicca: A Complete Overview

Witchcraft & Wicca · 20 min read

The word “witch” has carried radically different meanings across the centuries: cunning villager, church-sanctioned villain, Romantic visionary, and, in the twentieth century, priestess of a nature religion publicly called Wicca. Few other English words have done so much semantic work. To follow the thread from the medieval cunning woman through the European witch trials, the German Romantics, the British folklorists, Gerald Gardner’s New Forest circle, and the American revival of the 1960s and 70s is to watch a single, embattled figure acquire, layer by layer, every meaning her persecutors and her champions could pour into her.

The story has a particular shape. The historian Ronald Hutton, whose The Triumph of the Moon (1999) remains the standard scholarly account, has argued that what we now call modern witchcraft is, on the one hand, a genuine religious innovation of the early twentieth century, and on the other, a recovery and rearrangement of older folk traditions that had been misunderstood for centuries. There is a real dispute, still, between those who emphasise the novelty of the revival and those who emphasise the survival of older practice; the dispute is itself part of the religion’s self-understanding.

This article traces the long arc of that story: the figure of the witch before the trials, the trials themselves, the Romantic rehabilitation, the founding of Wicca by Gerald Gardner, the work of Doreen Valiente, the spread of the religion to North America, the formation of the major contemporary traditions, and the place of Wicca in the present-day Western world.

The cunning figure before the trials

Long before there was a religion called Wicca, there were people called witches. The earliest records in English and on the Continent point to figures who did things ordinary villagers could not: healed with herbs, found lost objects, marked the boundaries of the village, read the weather. Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), still one of the most influential studies of early modern English magical practice, showed how the village cunning man or woman was a recognised figure in Tudor and Stuart England, consulted for everything from cattle disease to suspected theft.

In the pre-Christian and early medieval world, this figure was not yet a heretic. She was a healer, a midwife, a “wise” person who knew the hidden properties of plants and the turning of seasons. Folklore scholars sometimes describe her as the surviving remnant of an older, shamanic stratum of European religion, in which gifted individuals served as intermediaries between the human and spirit worlds. None of this was considered satanic. A cunning woman in a Christianised landscape might still attend Mass on Sunday, bless the crops, and bury the dead in the churchyard, while also being called on for charms against sickness or to find a thief.

The vocabulary in different languages tells the story. Old English had wicce (female) and wicca (male); the related Old High German wîzzag meant “prophet” or “seer”. The figure the medieval Church would later prosecute as a witch was, in earlier centuries, an unremarkable member of the village.

The European witch trials, 1450–1750

Between roughly the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, European authorities carried out the most sustained persecution of alleged witches in recorded history. The theological image of the witch changed dramatically: from cunning village healer, to servant of the Devil, to member of a hidden coven, to rider of the nocturnal sabbath. Brian Levack’s The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (3rd ed., 2015) gives 40,000 to 50,000 as the consensus figure for executions across the period, with a further 100,000 or so trials that did not end in execution. Other historians, including Johannes Dillinger in Evil People (2009), have put the totals higher; the exact number remains a matter of regional and archival argument.

The trials were not uniform. The great continental hunts at Trier (1581–93), Würzburg (1626–31), and Bamberg (1626–31) involved clerical and civic authorities and produced mass executions by burning. Calvinist Scotland, with its trials of 1590–91 and 1649–50, was particularly lethal per capita. Lutheran German lands, French Catholic territories, and Puritan New England each developed their own patterns of accusation, confession, and execution. The American colonies produced the famous Salem trials of 1692–93, in which more than 150 people were accused and 20 executed before the court was dissolved. The trials were not, as the witch-cult thesis would later claim, the persecution of an organised fertility religion. They were, as the historian Diane Purkiss argues in The Witch in History (1996), the violent intersection of local fear, theological anxiety, and judicial procedure.

The literature of persecution was international. The Malleus Maleficarum (1487), the manual of the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, codified the image of the witch as the inversion of the Christian woman, in league with demons, capable of maleficium, and recognisable by the “witch’s mark” on the body. The Malleus was not the first treatise on witchcraft, but it became the most widely read and reprinted.

The trials declined across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scepticism grew among the educated classes, jurists questioned the admissibility of spectral evidence, and the last major continental hunts, such as those at Szeged in 1728–29, were already regarded by contemporaries as aberrations. The English Witchcraft Act of 1735, which removed the death penalty and criminalised only the pretence of exercising witchcraft, signalled the legal abandonment of the old model. It would be more than two centuries before the law was finally repealed.

The Romantic rehabilitation

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced a complete inversion of the witch’s image. Writers in Germany, Britain, and France began to portray witches, magicians, and folk healers not as allies of Satan but as bearers of a suppressed older wisdom. The folklorist Jacob Grimm, in his Deutsche Mythologie (1835), drew on philological evidence to reconstruct a pre-Christian Germanic pantheon in which witches and wise folk were heirs of a much older, native culture. His brother Wilhelm, whose fairy-tale collection (with Jacob) appeared from 1812 onward, helped make the figure of the folk magician respectable to a mass readership.

Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine (1811), with its sympathetic treatment of a water-spirit, sits at the margins of this revival. The novel is one of several Romantic-era treatments of the supernatural, but Fouqué is not normally classed among the direct ancestors of modern witchcraft; the genealogy from Grimm and from the folklorists of the British Folklore Society (founded 1878) is more direct.

The most influential single figure in the Romantic rehabilitation was the British Egyptologist and folklorist Margaret Alice Murray (1863–1963). In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1933), Murray argued that the European witch trials had not been persecutions of Satanism at all. They were, she claimed, the suppression of a surviving pre-Christian fertility religion devoted to a Horned God, whose initiates met in covens, honoured a horned divinity, and were accused of diabolism by a Christian judiciary that could not understand the older rites. Murray’s thesis was enormously popular and shaped the imagination of almost every early Wiccan. It also shaped the public image of the witch for the rest of the twentieth century.

What Murray did, despite the inaccuracy, was give the modern revival a story it could tell about itself. The witch-cult hypothesis provided lineage, dignity, and a usable past.

The triple-form goddess of Maiden, Mother, and Crone that is so central to Wiccan devotion comes not from Murray but from a different source: Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1948), a work of literary scholarship and poetic mythography that argued for an ancient, matriarchal, lunar goddess at the heart of European poetry. Graves’s goddess is more literary than Murray’s horned god, and her triple form became a fixture of Wiccan devotion in the 1960s and 70s. Like Murray, Graves was speculating; unlike Murray, his influence on the religion has outlasted the academic reaction to his work.

The Romantic witch, more than the persecuting courtroom or the medieval village, is the direct ancestor of the modern witch. Without the Romantic rehabilitation, there is no mid-twentieth-century revival. The historian Ronald Hutton, in The Triumph of the Moon, has shown how thoroughly the early Wiccans drew on the Romantic image, on folklorist scholarship, and on the older grimoire tradition in constructing their religion.

The Murray thesis and the academic reaction

Modern historians are nearly unanimous that Murray’s witch-cult thesis does not hold up. The sabbath, the coven, and the horned god of the trials appear, as Carlo Ginzburg showed in The Night Battles (1966, English 1983) and Ecstasies (1989), to be far more local, far more diverse, and far more closely tied to inquisitorial technique than Murray’s pan-European cult would allow. The sabbath described in trial records is, in most cases, a product of the interrogator’s leading questions, learned from the Malleus Maleficarum and similar manuals, not a description of an actual meeting. Ginzburg’s research on the benandanti of Friuli, Italian peasant spirit-fighters who were eventually absorbed into the sabbath stereotype under inquisitorial pressure, did more than any other single body of work to dismantle the Murray thesis.

By the 1970s the academic consensus had shifted decisively. The historian Geoffrey Scarre, in Witchcraft and Magic in 16th and 17th Century Europe (1987), and the folklorist Julian Goodare, in his editing of the Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (2013), represent the consensus: most accused witches were ordinary villagers whose confessions were coerced, not initiates preserving an ancient faith.

Murray’s work is still in print, and it is still cited in some popular accounts. The mainstream scholarly view is now that her work was speculative to the point of invention. Murray, as the historian John Demos put it, “constructed a witch-cult that existed almost entirely in her own mind.” The cultural effect of her work, however, has been enormous; the witch-cult hypothesis is the load-bearing myth of the modern revival.

Gerald Gardner and the founding of Wicca

The religion now called Wicca is conventionally dated to the early 1940s and the work of Gerald Brosseau Gardner (1884–1964), an English civil servant, amateur anthropologist, and occultist who settled on the southern coast of England after spending much of his life in Malaya and Borneo.

Gardner claimed that, in 1939, he was initiated into a surviving coven of traditional witches operating in the New Forest area of Hampshire. The story of the New Forest coven is contested. Gardner never disclosed the names of his initiators, the alleged coven left no independent documentary trace, and the demographic and historical details of his account are not internally consistent. Ronald Hutton’s examination in The Triumph of the Moon concluded that the coven, as Gardner described it, was almost certainly his own construction, drawing on members of his own circle and on the older magical traditions available to him. Aidan Kelly, in his 1991 reconstruction of Gardnerian history (Crafting the Art of Magic), and more recently the historian Ronald Hutton again in The Witch (2023), have laid out the case against the coven’s historicity in detail.

What is not in doubt is that, beginning in the late 1940s and especially after the repeal of the Witchcraft Act of 1735 in 1951, Gardner began to publish the first explicit books on the new religion. High Magic’s Aid (1949), a novel, and Witchcraft Today (1954), a defence of the old religion, presented his account to a public readership. The repeal of the Witchcraft Act was a turning point: so long as the law criminalised the pretence of exercising witchcraft, no one in Britain could openly practise the craft.

Gardner codified his material in what he called the Book of Shadows, a collection of rituals, laws, and invocations that formed the working text of his coven. Copies were hand-copied by initiates, and several versions circulated. The most influential of these, the rituals later published as the Gardnerian Book of Shadows, contained the structure that would come to define Wiccan practice: a degree system of initiation, the casting of a magic circle, the invocation of the Goddess and the Horned God, the role of the High Priestess and High Priest, and the central ritual of the Drawing Down of the Moon and the Great Rite.

A working knowledge of ceremonial magic, inherited from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its offshoots, gave Gardner’s rituals a level of structure absent from most folk magic. Gardner himself had been a member of Crowleyite organisations, including the Ordo Templi Orientis, in the late 1940s, and the borrowings from the Golden Dawn tradition are visible in the ritual structure of early Wicca.

Doreen Valiente and the rewriting of the liturgy

Gardner’s early rituals leaned heavily on direct borrowings from the works of Aleister Crowley, including passages of the “Gnostic Mass” and several invocations. This proved awkward once the Wiccan public identity became clearer, and the second great figure in the Wiccan story, Doreen Valiente (1922–1999), set out to clean up the liturgy. Valiente, who became High Priestess of Gardner’s Bricket Wood coven, rewrote the Charge of the Goddess and the invocation of the Horned God, replacing Crowley-derived material with poetry that drew on English folk tradition, on Leland’s Aradia, and on her own considerable literary gifts. Valiente’s account of the rewriting is in her The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989), and her biographer J. H. Brennan has published extracts from her diaries in Doreen Valiente: A Literary Biography (2014).

Valiente’s verses are what most modern Wiccans actually recite. The Charge of the Goddess in her reworking has become the single most quoted text in Wicca. Her hand is also visible in the formulation of the Wiccan Rede, a moral saying that, in its modern form “An it harm none, do what ye will”, is generally traced to the 1974 “Rede of the Wiccae” by the American initiate Adriana Porter, and to Valiente’s 1978 Witchcraft for Tomorrow. The Rede and the related Threefold Law of return, the belief that magical action returns to the actor threefold, are treated by many Wiccans as defining ethical principles.

Criticisms and controversies

The founding of Wicca has generated a number of disputes that the scholarly community has been working through for decades. They are worth setting out, because they are part of the religion’s self-understanding.

The most sustained internal criticism has come from Aidan A. Kelly, a Wiccan scholar who, since the 1970s, has argued that much of the early Gardnerian Book of Shadows — including passages of the Charge of the Goddess and the Witches’ Rune — was drawn directly from the published writings and rituals of Aleister Crowley and of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, sometimes without acknowledgement. Kelly’s archival work, much of it published in The Pomegranate and in his 1991 Crafting the Art of Magic, has produced a detailed picture of the borrowing. The mainstream view today is that the Gardnerian Book of Shadows was, in its earliest form, substantially composed of material from older published sources, which Gardner and his circle then refashioned into the liturgy of the new religion. Valiente’s role in cleaning up the liturgy is itself part of this story; her rewriting is what made the rituals usable for a public religion.

A second, related controversy concerns Robert Cochrane (1931–1966), the English witch who founded the Clan of Tubal Cain and championed a Traditional Witchcraft rooted in English cunning-craft rather than in Gardnerian ceremonial magic. Cochrane attacked Gardner openly in The Tree of Enchantment (published posthumously) and in correspondence, accusing him of inventing a religion of the Golden Dawn and Crowley. The dispute shaped the self-understanding of Traditional Witchcraft and remains a live issue in the contemporary craft.

A third controversy is the Cochrane succession itself, which has produced competing claimants to Cochrane’s lineage and several distinct Traditional Witchcraft traditions (the 1734 tradition, the Roebuck tradition, the Clan of Tubal Cain under Andrew Chumbley, and others). These are family disputes in the strict sense, and they matter because Traditional Witchcraft, more than Gardnerian Wicca, has tended to organise itself by lineage.

Finally, the Murray thesis, on which the early Gardnerian claim to pre-Christian continuity rested, has been academically dead since the 1970s. Its persistence in popular Wiccan writing is one of the most common sources of confusion for newcomers.

The spread of Wicca to North America

Gardner did not live to see his religion become a global movement, but the groundwork had been laid. In 1962, Raymond Buckland (1934–2017), an Englishman who had been initiated into a Gardnerian coven on the Isle of Man, emigrated to the United States and settled on Long Island. With his wife Rosemary, he founded one of the earliest Gardnerian covens on American soil, and his books — Witchcraft from the Inside (1971), The Tree: The Complete Book of Saxon Witchcraft (1974), and A Complete Guide to the Study of Witchcraft (1975) — were for years the most widely available practical manuals of Wicca in the United States. Buckland is sometimes confused with Jessie Wicker Bell, the American witch who published as “Lady Sheba”; the two wrote independently, and Lady Sheba’s 1971 Book of Shadows — which leaked earlier Gardnerian material and helped to break the British secrecy tradition — is a separate publication.

Buckland later developed a less initiatory, more public tradition called Seax-Wica, drawing on Anglo-Saxon sources, and trained many American Witches in his Long Island and New Hampshire covens. He began editing the Witches’ Almanac in 1971; the almanac helped distribute Wiccan ideas and dates to a wide audience for decades.

American witchcraft in the 1960s and 1970s

The American scene of the late 1960s and 1970s was, if anything, even more vibrant than the British. Several distinct currents emerged, each with a different emphasis.

The English witch Sybil Leek (1917–1982) emigrated to the United States in 1968 and became, through books such as Diary of a Witch (1968) and television appearances on the Merv Griffin show, the most visible face of witchcraft in the American counterculture. Leek presented herself as a hereditary witch from a long line of English country witches; her actual initiation was into a Gardnerian coven, but the folk-witch image she projected shaped public expectations of what a witch should look and sound like.

Paul Huson, a British-born author and occultist, published The Devil’s Picturebook (1971) and, more importantly, Mastering Witchcraft (1970), which became the most influential practical manual of American witchcraft. Huson drew openly on the medieval grimoire tradition, including the Lesser Key of Solomon and the Goetia, and presented witchcraft as a serious magical art.

Miriam Simos, writing as Starhawk, published The Spiral Dance in 1979, a book that recast Wiccan ideas in a feminist, ecological, and politically activist key. The Reclaiming tradition that she helped found in California in the late 1970s remains one of the largest organised currents in contemporary witchcraft.

In 1971, Z Budapest (Zsuzsanna Emese Budapest, born 1943) and a group of Bay Area women founded the Susan B. Anthony Coven, the first women-only Wiccan coven in the United States. Budapest’s Dianic witchcraft separated the Goddess from the Horned God and made women’s spirituality the central focus. The Dianic tradition is, alongside Reclaiming, one of the most influential feminist currents in modern Wicca.

The formation of the modern traditions

The diversity of the modern movement can be sorted into a handful of broad traditions, each with a different emphasis.

Gardnerian Wicca is the oldest and most lineage-conscious of the British Wiccan traditions. It preserves the three-degree initiatory system established by Gardner in the 1940s and 1950s. Initiates are traditionally oath-bound to secrecy about the details of the rituals. Gardnerian covens meet in small groups, work skyclad (unclothed), and are led by a High Priestess and High Priest.

Alexandrian Wicca was founded in the early 1960s by Alex Sanders (1926–1988), who claimed hereditary initiation but was most likely initiated into a Gardnerian-derived coven. Alexandrian practice closely resembles Gardnerian practice, with more Kabbalistic and ceremonial-magic borrowings, and a willingness to use more elaborate ritual. Sanders’s partnership with his wife Maxine Sanders (who published her own account, Alex and Maxine Sanders: King and Queen of Witchcraft, 1983) made the tradition a public feature of British witchcraft.

Dianic Wicca, as developed by Z Budapest, centres the Goddess — often in her triple aspect as Maiden, Mother, and Crone — and either omits the Horned God or treats him as a secondary figure. Dianic covens are usually women-only, and the tradition has been particularly important in feminist spirituality.

Eclectic Wicca emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, in which practitioners draw from many sources — Gardnerian, Alexandrian, folk, ceremonial, Goddess-feminist — and assemble a personal practice rather than receiving initiation into a single lineage. Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner (1988) was enormously influential in popularising Eclectic and Solitary Wicca in North America. Eclectic Wicca is the most common form of Wicca on the continent.

Traditional Witchcraft, distinct from Wicca, claims descent from pre-modern folk practice. It tends to be less duotheistic, more animistic, and more concerned with spirit-work, ancestors, and the “art of the wise.” Robert Cochrane, Andrew Chumbley, and the Clan of Tubal Cain have shaped its self-understanding. The American witch Sabina Magliocco, in Witching Culture (2004), has documented the persistence of folk-magic elements in contemporary American witchcraft.

Wicca, witchcraft, and neopaganism

The terms Wicca, witchcraft, and neopaganism are often used as if they were interchangeable, but they are not, and the difference matters.

Wicca, in the strict sense, refers to the religion founded by Gardner and his immediate successors, organised in covens, with initiatory degrees, a Book of Shadows, and a duotheistic theology of Goddess and Horned God. Wicca is initiatory, oath-bound in its classical forms, and historically associated with British and American coven structure.

Modern witchcraft, or “the Craft”, is a broader category that includes Wicca but extends to a wide range of other approaches. Some witches practise the “Old Religion” of folk magic; some work with the spirits of place; some draw on the traditions of cunning folk, herbalism, and hedge-riding. Modern witchcraft may be solitary or communal, initiatory or self-initiated, and it has no central authority.

Neopaganism is the umbrella term. It covers Wicca, modern witchcraft, Heathenry (Asatru and the Vanatru traditions), Druidry, Hellenic reconstruction, and many other movements that draw on the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the Mediterranean. The folklorist Chas S. Clifton, in Her Hidden Children (2006), and the British Wiccan priestess Vivianne Crowley, in Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium (2002), have both emphasised the porous boundaries between these movements.

The contemporary world

There is no central authority for Wicca. Estimates of the number of Wiccans worldwide range widely, from a few hundred thousand to perhaps two million, with the highest numbers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and parts of continental Europe. The 2008 Pew Forum survey estimated that about 0.4% of US adults identified with Wicca or paganism; subsequent surveys, including the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Study, have suggested higher numbers, in the range of 1.5 to 2 million Americans, but precise figures remain elusive. Wicca is, demographically, a young and overwhelmingly internet-fluent religion.

Wicca has been legally recognised as a religion in several jurisdictions. In the United States, the Army approved a pentacle for use on gravestones and religious emblems in 2006, after a long campaign by Selena Fox and the Lady Liberty League; in 2017, the Navy appointed its first Wiccan chaplain. Wicca is included in the category of “alternative and spiritual” religions by most sociological surveys of religion. The legal recognition has not, in itself, ended the suspicion with which the religion is still treated in some American evangelical circles, but it has given Wiccans legal standing that the religion did not have in Gardner’s lifetime.

Contemporary Wicca is also, increasingly, a religion carried on the internet. Online covens, study courses, podcasts, and social media groups have become a major way that solitary and eclectic Witches learn, gather, and practise. The ritual vocabulary of Wicca — circle, quarter, rede, athame, pentacle — has spread into the broader culture to a degree that would have astonished Gardner in 1954.

Sources and further reading

The scholarly literature on modern witchcraft and on the historical witch trials is large and growing. The following works are the most useful starting points for a reader who wants to go further.

  • 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 modern revival; required reading.
  • Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present (Yale University Press, 2017) and Queens of the Wild (Yale, 2022). Hutton’s broader historical writing on witchcraft and paganism.
  • Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (3rd ed., Routledge, 2015). The standard scholarly account of the trials.
  • Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971). Still the indispensable study of magical belief in early modern England.
  • Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (Routledge, 1996). A literary-historical reading of the witch figure.
  • Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Johns Hopkins, 1983; originally Italian 1966) and Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (Penguin, 1990; originally Italian 1989). Ginzburg’s microhistorical work on the benandanti and on the construction of the sabbath.
  • Julian Goodare (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (Oxford, 2013). The state of the field in 2013.
  • John Demos, The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World (Oxford, 2008).
  • Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow, Witchcraft and Magic in 16th and 17th Century Europe (Macmillan, 1987; 2nd ed. 2001).
  • Doreen Valiente, The Rebirth of Witchcraft (Hale, 1989) and Witchcraft for Tomorrow (Hale, 1978). Valiente’s own account of the early Gardnerian material she helped reform.
  • J. H. Brennan, Doreen Valiente: A Literary Biography (Llareggub, 2014). The standard biography, drawing on Valiente’s diaries.
  • Aidan A. Kelly, Crafting the Art of Magic (Llewellyn, 1991) and various articles in The Pomegranate. Kelly’s reconstruction of the Bricket Wood history.
  • Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). The standard ethnographic study of American witchcraft.
  • Chas S. Clifton, Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (AltaMira, 2006).
  • Vivianne Crowley, Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium (Thorsons, 2002). A sympathetic insider account of contemporary Wicca.
  • Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Faber, 1948; revised 1961). The literary source of the Triple Goddess.
  • Margaret Alice Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford, 1921) and The God of the Witches (Sampson Low, 1933). Read now as a cultural document, not as history.