Wicca (Part I)

Wicca (English pronunciation: /ˈwɪkə/), also termed Pagan Witchcraft, is a contemporary Pagan new religious movement. It was developed in England during the first half of the 20th century and was introduced to the public in 1954 by Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant. Wicca draws upon a diverse set of ancient pagan and 20th century hermetic motifs for its theological structure and ritual practice.

Wicca has no central authority. Its traditional core beliefs, principles and practices were originally outlined in the 1940s and 1950s by Gardner and Doreen Valiente, both in published books as well as in secret written and oral teachings passed along to their initiates. There are many variations on the core structure, and the religion grows and evolves over time. It is divided into a number of diverse lineages, sects and denominations, referred to as traditions, each with its own organizational structure and level of centralization. Due to its decentralized nature, there is some disagreement over what actually constitutes Wicca. Some traditions, collectively referred to as British Traditional Wicca, strictly follow the initiatory lineage of Gardner and consider the term Wicca to apply only to similar traditions, but not to newer, eclectic traditions.

Wicca is typically duotheistic, worshipping a Goddess and a God. These are traditionally viewed as the Moon Goddess and the Horned God, respectively. These deities may be regarded in a henotheistic way, as having many different divine aspects which can in turn be identified with many diverse pagan deities from different historical pantheons. For this reason, they are sometimes referred to as the "Great Goddess" and the "Great Horned God", with the adjective "great" connoting a deity that contains many other deities within their own nature. These two deities are sometimes viewed as facets of a greater pantheistic divinity, which is regarded as an impersonal force or process rather than a personal deity. While duotheism or bitheism is traditional in Wicca, broader Wiccan beliefs range from polytheism to pantheism or monism, even to Goddess monotheism.

Wiccan celebrations encompass both the cycles of the Moon, known as Esbats and commonly associated with the Goddess, and the cycles of the Sun, seasonally based festivals known as Sabbats and commonly associated with the Horned God. An unattributed statement known as the Wiccan Rede is a popular expression of Wiccan morality, although it is not accepted by all Wiccans. Wicca often involves the ritual practice of magic, though it is not always necessary.

Definition and terminology

Scholars of religious studies classify Wicca as a new religious movement, and more specifically as a form of modern Paganism.  Cited as the largest,  best known, most influential, and most extensively academically studied form of Paganism, within the movement it has been identified as sitting on the former end of the eclectic to reconstructionist spectrum.  Several academics have also categorized Wicca as a form of nature religion, a term that is also embraced by many of the faith's practitioners.  However, given that Wicca also incorporates the practice of magic; several scholars have referred to it as a "magico-religion".  Wicca is also a form of Western esotericism, and more specifically a part of the esoteric current known as occultism.  Although recognized as a religion by academics, some evangelical Christians have attempted to deny it legal recognition as such, while some Wiccan practitioners themselves eschew the term "religion" – associating the latter purely with organized religion – instead favoring "spirituality" or "way of life".  Although Wicca as a religion is distinct from other forms of contemporary Paganism, there has been much "cross-fertilization" between these different Pagan faiths; accordingly, Wicca has both influenced and been influenced by other Pagan religions, thus making clear-cut distinctions between them more difficult for religious studies scholars to make.  The terms wizard and warlock are generally discouraged in the community.  In Wicca, denominations are referred to as traditions, while non-Wiccans are often termed cowans.

 When the religion first came to public attention, it was commonly called "Witchcraft".  For instance, the prominent "Father of Wicca", Gerald Gardner, referred to it as the "Craft of the Wise", "witchcraft", and "the witch-cult" during the 1950s.  It is unclear if he ever called it "Wicca", although he did refer to the collective community of Pagan Witches as "the Wica" (with one c).   As a name for the religion, "Wicca" developed in Britain during the 1960s.  It is not known who precisely invented the term "Wicca" in reference to the religion, although one possibility is that it might have been Gardner's rival Charles Cardell, who was referring to it as the "Craft of the Wiccens" by 1958.  The first recorded use of the word "Wicca" appears in 1962, and it had been popularized to the extent that several British practitioners founded a newsletter called The Wiccan in 1968.

Although pronounced differently, the Modern English term "Wicca" is derived from Middle English wicche, which itself comes from Old English wicca (/ˈwɪttʃɑː/) and wicce (/ˈwɪttʃeɪ/), the masculine term for wizard/sorcerer and the feminine term for witch, respectively, that was used in Anglo-Saxon England.  By adopting it for modern usage, Wiccans were both symbolically cementing their connection to the ancient, pre-Christian past, and adopting a self-designation that would be less controversial than "Witchcraft".

In early sources "Wicca" referred to the entirety of the religion rather than specific traditions.  In ensuing decades, members of certain traditions – those known as British Traditional Wicca – began claiming that only they should be termed "Wiccan", and that other forms of the religion must not use it. From the late 1980s onwards various books propagating Wicca were published that again used the former, broader definition of the word.  Thus, by the 1980s, there were two competing definitions of the word "Wicca" in use among the Pagan and esoteric communities, one broad and inclusive, the other smaller and exclusionary.  Although there are exceptions, among scholars of Pagan studies it is the older, inclusive use of the term which has gained wider usage.  Conversely, in various forms of popular culture, such as television programs Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed, the word "Wicca" has been used as a synonym for witchcraft more generally, including in non-religious and non-Pagan forms.

Alongside "Wicca", two other names often used for the religion by its practitioners are "Witchcraft" and "the Craft".   However, the Pagan studies scholar Ethan Doyle White noted that the use of the word "Witchcraft" in this context was problematic because the term resulted in the religion being easily confused both with other, non-religious forms of witchcraft as well as other religions – such as Satanism and Luciferianism – whose practitioners sometimes describe themselves as "Witches".   Another term that is at times used as a synonym for "Wicca" is "Pagan Witchcraft", although Doyle White again critiqued the utility of this term by noting that there were forms of modern Paganism – such as types of Heathenry – which also practiced magic and thus could also be described as "Pagan Witchcraft".  From the 1990s onward, various Wiccans began describing themselves as "Traditional Witches", although problematically that was a term also employed by practitioners of other magico-religious traditions such as Luciferianism.

Beliefs

Theology

Theological views within Wicca are diverse, and the religion encompasses theists, atheists, and agnostics, with some viewing the religion's deities as entities with a literal existence and others viewing them as Jungian archetypes or symbols.  Even among theistic Wiccans, there are divergent beliefs, and Wicca includes pantheists, monotheists, duotheists, and polytheists.  Common to these divergent perspectives, however, is that Wicca's deities are viewed as forms of ancient, pre-Christian divinities by its practitioners.

Most early Wiccan groups adhered to the duotheistic worship of a Horned God of fertility and a Mother Goddess, with practitioners typically believing that these had been the ancient deities worshipped by the hunter-gatherers of the Old Stone Age, whose veneration had been passed down in secret right to the present.  This theology derived from Margaret Murray's claims about the witch-cult; she claimed that whereas the cult as recorded in the Early Modern witch trials had venerated a Horned God, centuries before it had also worshipped a Mother Goddess.  This duotheistic Horned God/Mother Goddess structure was embraced by Gardner – who claimed that it had Stone Age roots – and remains the underlying theological basis to his Gardnerian tradition.  Gardner claimed that the names of these deities were to be kept secret within the tradition, although in 1964 they were publicly revealed to be Cernunnos and Aradia; the secret Gardnerian deity names were subsequently changed.

Although different Wiccans attribute different traits to the Horned God, he is most often associated with animals and the natural world, but also with the afterlife, and he is furthermore often viewed as an ideal role model for men.  The Mother Goddess has been associated with life, fertility, and the springtime, and has been described as an ideal role model for women.  Wicca's duotheism has been compared to the Taoist system of yin and yang.  As such they are often interpreted as being "embodiments of a life-force manifest in nature".

Other Wiccans have adopted the original Gardnerian God/Goddess duotheistic structure but have adopted deity forms other than that of the Horned God and Mother Goddess.  For instance, the God has been interpreted as the Oak King and the Holly King, as well as the Sun God, Son/Lover God, and Vegetation God.  He has also been seen in the roles of the Leader of the Wild Hunt and the Lord of Death.  The Goddess is often portrayed as a Triple Goddess, thereby being a triadic deity comprising a Maiden goddess, a Mother goddess, and a Crone goddess, each of whom has different associations, namely virginity, fertility and wisdom.  Other Wiccan conceptualizations have portrayed her as a Moon Goddess and as a Menstruating Goddess.

The Gods are real, not as persons, but as vehicles of power. Briefly, it may be explained that the personification of a particular type of cosmic power in the form of a God or Goddess, carried out by believers and worshippers over many centuries, builds that God-form or Magical Image into a potent reality on the Inner Planes, and makes it a means by which that type of cosmic power may be contacted.

Gerald Gardner (1959)

Gardner stated that beyond Wicca's two deities was the "Supreme Deity" or "Prime Mover", an entity that was too complex for humans to understand.  This belief has been endorsed by other prominent practitioners, who have referred to it as "the Cosmic Logos", "Supreme Cosmic Power", or "Godhead".   Gardner envisioned this Supreme Deity as a deist entity who had created the "Under-Gods", among them the God and Goddess, but who was not otherwise involved in the world; alternately, other Wiccans have interpreted such an entity as a pantheistic being, of which the God and Goddess are facets.

Although Gardner criticized monotheism, citing the Problem of Evil, explicitly monotheistic forms of Wicca developed in the 1960s, when the U.S.-based Church of Wicca developed a theology rooted in the worship of what they described as "one deity, without gender".  In the 1970s, Dianic Wiccan groups developed which were devoted to a singular, monotheistic Goddess; this approach was often criticized by members of British Traditional Wiccan groups, who lambasted such Goddess monotheism as an inverted imitation of Christian theology.  As in other forms of Wicca, some Goddess monotheists have expressed the view that the Goddess is not an entity with a literal existence, but rather a Jungian archetype.

 As well as pantheism and duotheism, many Wiccans accept the concept of polytheism, thereby believing that there are many different deities. Some accept the view espoused by the occultist Dion Fortune that "all gods are one god, and all goddesses are one goddess" – that is that the gods and goddesses of all cultures are, respectively, aspects of one supernal God and Goddess. With this mindset, a Wiccan may regard the Germanic Ēostre, Hindu Kali, and Christian Virgin Mary each as manifestations of one supreme Goddess and likewise, the Celtic Cernunnos, the ancient Greek Dionysus and the Judeo-Christian Yahweh as aspects of a single, archetypal god. A more strictly polytheistic approach holds the various goddesses and gods to be separate and distinct entities in their own right. The Wiccan writers Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone have postulated that Wicca is becoming more polytheistic as it matures, tending to embrace a more traditionally pagan worldview.  Some Wiccans conceive of deities’ not as literal personalities but as metaphorical archetypes or thoughtforms, thereby technically allowing them to be atheists.  Such a view was purported by the High Priestess Vivianne Crowley, herself a psychologist, who considered the Wiccan deities to be Jungian archetypes that existed within the subconscious that could be evoked in ritual. It was for this reason that she said that "The Goddess and God manifest to us in dream and vision."

Many Wiccans also adopt a more explicitly polytheistic or animistic world-view of the universe as being replete with spirit-beings. In many cases these spirits are associated with the natural world, for instance as genius loci, fairies, and elementals.  In other cases, such beliefs are more idiosyncratic and atypical; the prominent Wiccan Sybil Leek for instance endorsed a belief in angels.

Afterlife

Beltane altar

Belief in the afterlife varies among Wiccans, and does not occupy a central place within the religion.  As the historian Ronald Hutton remarked, "the instinctual position of most [Wiccans]... seems to be that if one makes the most of the present life, in all respects, then the next life is more or less certainly going to benefit from the process, and so one may as well concentrate on the present".   Although there are practitioners who do not believe in any form of afterlife, it is nevertheless a common belief among Wiccans that human beings have a spirit or soul that survives bodily death.  Understandings of what this soul constitutes vary among different traditions, with Feri Wicca for instance having adopted a belief from Hawaiian religion that the human being has three souls.

Although not accepted by all Wiccans, a belief in reincarnation is the dominant afterlife belief within Wicca, having been originally espoused by Gardner.  Understandings of how the cycle of reincarnation operates differ among practitioners; the prominent Wiccan Raymond Buckland for instance insisted that the souls of humans would only ever incarnate into human bodies, whereas other Wiccans believe that the soul of a human can incarnate into any other life form.  There is also a common Wiccan belief that any Witches will come to be reincarnated as future Witches, an idea originally expressed by Gardner.  Gardner also articulated the view that the human soul rested for a period between bodily death and its incarnation, with this resting place commonly being referred to as The Summerland among the Wiccan community. This allows many Wiccans to believe that mediums are able to contact the spirits of the deceased, a belief that it adopted from Spiritualism.