There are many misconceptions about Wicca. It seems to get stuck in the middle of the Witchcraft spectrum. For the White Witches, we are too dark. For the Traditional Witches, we are not dark enough. Wicca is sometimes dismissed as Witchcraft Lite.
Last week, I saw the following image on my Instagram feed.
The Instagram user who posted it, deathsdarkveil (account now defunct), is someone I follow because he posts beautiful and interesting images. I don’t know him personally, and I know almost nothing about him. He practices Cornish/English Witchcraft, and people sometimes assume he’s Wiccan. It’s a common assumption, and no doubt, it gets annoying. Hence this image.
I noticed that the image had a few comments, so I clicked on it to read them. When the young man admitted that he doesn’t know much about Wicca, another Instragam user explained. The following has been edited for grammar and clarity.
“Wicca is kind of like witchcraft lite. It encompasses a lot of beliefs that center around goddess worship, but it takes goddesses from different cultures like Egyptian, Roman, Celtic, etc. and crams them all together, not realizing, of course, that these religions would never have combined to form one faith. The basic tenets of Wicca are fairly reasonable. The ideas it has are also acceptable, but truthfully, it’s not really built on much as a religious faith goes. It ignores that traditional witchcraft was based on a system of folk beliefs that involved white and dark magick. Wicca attempts to practice without the Left-Hand Path, and, unfortunately, both paths are needed. Ever seen a person try to paddle a canoe using one side? I think Wicca helps people get interested in the practice of witchery and, in that way, it’s not awful, but again this was a religion completely fabricated in the 1950s by Gerald Gardner.”
These are typical misconceptions about Wicca. Let’s explore them further. When I refer to Wicca here, I mean Traditional Wicca and forms of Wicca derived from it.
Wicca is Witchcraft Lite
“Wicca is kind of like witchcraft lite.”
Wicca and witchcraft mean the same thing. The word Wicca derives from an Old English word for witch. Gerald Gardner used the word Wica to refer to the “witch-cult” he believed was a surviving ancient religion. To Gardner, there was no difference between Wicca and witchcraft.Â
The lines between Wicca and Traditional Witchcraft are blurry, and there’s no single accepted definition of these. While a Witch is not necessarily a Wiccan, Wiccans are Witches, and there isn’t any practice or experience in Traditional Witchcraft that you can’t find somewhere in the Wiccan community.
I see this trend among Traditional Witches who seem to think that Wiccans don’t engage in work involving bones, blood, sex, spirits, possession, trance, ecstasy, mysticism, and so forth. It is simply not true. It is worth considering that Wiccans may be discreet in how they present their witchcraft publicly.
“It encompasses a lot of beliefs that center around goddess worship, but it takes goddesses from different cultures like Egyptian, Roman, Celtic, etc. and crams them all together, not realizing, of course, that these religions would never have combined to form one faith.”
This statement suggests that Traditional Witchcraft doesn’t “take” goddesses from various cultures. The commentator doesn’t tell us what Traditional Witchcraft is or which deities, if any, are present, but if it includes Cochrane’s Craft, for example, they are incorrect.
Gardner’s Wicca was not centred around goddess worship. It was duotheistic, worshipping a Goddess and a God, tribal gods whose identities are an oath-bound secret. Over the years, some Wiccans have expanded on this and are polytheistic to different degrees. Some Wiccans draw from various cultures, and this is neither new nor exclusive to Wicca, nor do they necessarily do it with the ignorance that the commentator suggests.
The commentator states that the polytheistic religions mentioned would never have combined to form one faith. That may be true, but religions have developed and changed and merged in countless ways. Syncretism combines different, even contradictory, beliefs. Ancient peoples adopted foreign cults and merged divine duties and identities all the time. This is how we had the cult of Cybele in Greece, the worship of Isis in Rome, Tanit in Spain, Sulis Minerva in Roman Britain, new gods absorb and supplant old ones, and so forth.
“The basic tenets of Wicca are fairly reasonable. The ideas it has are also acceptable, but truthfully, it’s not really built on much as a religious faith goes. It ignores that traditional witchcraft was based on a system of folk beliefs that involved white and dark magick. Wicca attempts to practice without the Left-Hand Path, and, unfortunately, both paths are needed. Ever seen a person try to paddle a canoe using one side?”
The commentator doesn’t elaborate on the “fairly reasonable” tenets and ideas of Wicca, so I won’t speculate on what they mean. The rest is an interesting criticism because, for years, one of the essential characteristics of Wicca was the idea of polarity.
Wicca generally has a dualistic approach to deity: a God and a Goddess. Its mythic Wheel is on their divine relationship, and their sacred union is embodied and re-enacted in the Great Rite. Aside from becoming more polytheistic, Wiccans have also become critical of their religion. Some Wiccans conclude that this binary approach excludes LGBTIQ+ peoples. They have changed or eliminated it. The idea of balance has primarily remained, however.
Wicca is influenced by many things, including folk magic and ceremonial magick. It’s not that Wiccans don’t practice the Left-Hand Path. It’s that we don’t generally bother with the language of white or black magick. It’s all just magick to us. My right hand and my left hand serve the same master.
“I think Wicca helps people get interested in the practice of witchery and, in that way, it’s not awful, but again this was a religion completely fabricated in the 1950s by Gerald Gardner.”
Gardner claimed to have been initiated into a “witch-cult” in September 1939, a group known as the New Forest Coven. He went on to form the tradition we’ve come to know as Gardnerian Wicca and from which other forms of Wicca have developed.
There has been a longtime preoccupation with the idea that Gardner invented Wicca. The arguments over authenticity have been going on since Gardner went public. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s, Robert Cochrane claimed that his family had been practitioners of an ancient pagan witch-cult since at least the 17th century. He positioned himself as a Traditional Witch who practised an older and more authentic form of witchcraft than Gardner’s Wicca. Members of his family and historians have disputed Cochrane’s claims. Either way, it makes no difference to adherents of Cochrane’s Craft or to Gardnerians.
Wicca and Traditional Witchcraft have almost the same mythic history and aesthetic. Wiccans have long drawn inspiration from ideas about medieval European witchcraft, and some still assert we come down from the feared and respected cunning folks that lived on the fringes of their villages. Meanwhile, ordinary women and men who often saw themselves as enemies of witches used folk magic to combat evil forces.
So, what is the difference between Wicca and Traditional Witchcraft?
It’s not an easy question to answer. Traditional Witchcraft refers to various forms of witchcraft that are thought to be older and more authentic than Wicca, but that is questionable. There is little evidence that any traditional religious witchcraft existed in pre-modern Europe, and folklore and magic have always been part of the human experience. When she was a girl living in the American South, my friend’s grandmother hung snake skins on the fence to keep the Devil away, but that didn’t make her a witch.
Traditional Witchcraft is diverse, and it can look a lot like Wicca. They may both share devotional mysticism, initiatory lineages, ritual magic, and spellcraft. Some assert Traditional Witchcraft is a practice, not a religion, but there are theistic Traditional Witches.
The most telling description of Traditional Witchcraft may be “not Wicca”. Part of it is identity. Wicca is not the path for them. Some people want to be Witches without the circle, the degrees, the Rede, and all that other Wiccan stuff, and that is fine. Some Witches do all that and still don’t want to call themselves Wiccan, and that’s fine too. Some people need to feel like they are engaging with something unique and exclusive, not with their idea of what everyone else is doing.
Here is another image posted by the same young man as above.
