Modern witchcraft is a young movement with old roots. The religion of Wicca took shape in England in the 1940s and 1950s. The folk magick, festivals, and myths that it drew on are centuries or millennia older. Knowing which is which makes for a steadier practice.
Before Wicca: folk magick and the witch trials
Ordinary people in Europe have always used charms, herbs, and small rituals to heal, protect, and find what was lost. In Britain, the specialists were known as cunning folk or wise women and men. They served their neighbors for a fee, and nearly all of them considered themselves good Christians.
The witch trials of roughly 1450 to 1750 were a different matter. Courts across Europe and its colonies tried people for harming others by witchcraft and for making pacts with the devil. Historians estimate that between forty and sixty thousand people were executed. The accused were not members of an organized Pagan religion. The evidence shows frightened communities, bitter local disputes, and confessions taken under torture.
The idea of a surviving witch cult
In 1921 the Egyptologist Margaret Murray proposed that the people tried as witches had belonged to an ancient fertility religion that survived in secret beneath Christian Europe. The theory was vivid and it became widely known.
Historians have since examined the trial records closely and have rejected the theory. There is no evidence of an organized Pagan religion surviving into the early modern period. Even so, the idea was in the air in the 1930s and 1940s, and it shaped the way the founders of Wicca understood what they were doing.
Wicca becomes public
For centuries, British law made it a crime to claim magical powers. In 1951 the last Witchcraft Act was repealed, and it became possible to speak openly.
The person who did so was Gerald Gardner, a retired civil servant with a lifelong interest in folklore and magick. In 1954 he published a book describing a surviving witch religion whose members he had met in the south of England. He said that he had been initiated into one of their covens in 1939, and that their religion was a survival of the old witch cult.
Historians still debate what Gardner found and what he created. What is clear is that the religion he taught combined several sources: English folk magick and folklore, the ceremonial magick of earlier occult societies, the poetry and mythology he loved, and his own ideas. It was a new religion made from old material.
Gardner was not its only author. Doreen Valiente, who was initiated in 1953 and soon became his High Priestess, rewrote much of the ritual text in clear and beautiful language. The best-known version of the Charge of the Goddess is hers, and many Wiccans regard her as the mother of the modern Craft.
The 1960s and 1970s: the Craft spreads
In the 1960s Alex Sanders founded a second initiatory line, the Alexandrian tradition, which was more ceremonial in style. Initiates of Gardner's line carried the religion to North America in the same decade, and it took root quickly.
In the 1970s Wicca met the women's movement and the environmental movement, and it changed. Goddess-centered and feminist traditions appeared, including the Dianic tradition. New groups formed without any link to the English covens.
The calendar settled in this period too. The eight festivals had been brought together in the 1950s, and in the 1970s they acquired the names most people use today. Litha, Ostara, and Mabon were applied to the solstice and equinox festivals by an American Wiccan writer during that decade. Our guide to the Wheel of the Year explains what is old and what is recent in each festival.
The 1980s and 1990s: books and solitaries
Until the late 1970s, the only way into Wicca was through a coven. Then a wave of practical books taught readers to practice alone and to dedicate themselves without an initiator. Within a few years, solitary practitioners outnumbered coven members, and they still do.
These decades also brought a moral panic in which Pagans and witches were accused of belonging to imaginary criminal cults. Investigations found no evidence for any of it, but many practitioners learned to keep their beliefs private. Some still do, and our article on practicing in the broom closet is written for them.
The 2000s to today
The internet changed everything again. Information that was once passed from teacher to student became available to anyone, along with a good deal of nonsense. Witchcraft grew into something much wider than Wicca. Many people now practice folk magick, herb craft, and divination with no religious frame at all.
Recent years have brought healthy arguments about history, about the environmental cost of crystals and imported herbs, and about respect for traditions that belong to particular cultures. They are signs of a movement that is growing up.
A brief timeline
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 1450 to 1750 | The European witch trials |
| 1921 | Margaret Murray publishes her witch-cult theory, later rejected by historians |
| 1939 | The year in which Gerald Gardner said he was initiated into a coven |
| 1951 | Britain repeals its last Witchcraft Act |
| 1954 | Gardner publishes the first book to describe the religion |
| 1950s | Doreen Valiente rewrites much of the Wiccan liturgy |
| 1960s | The Alexandrian tradition is founded, and Wicca reaches North America |
| 1970s | Feminist and eclectic traditions emerge, and the modern sabbat names settle |
| 1980s | Books for solitary practitioners open the Craft to everyone |
| 2000s onward | Online communities form, and witchcraft grows well beyond Wicca |
What this means for your practice
Some newcomers are disappointed to learn that Wicca is not thousands of years old. There is no need to be. A religion is not made true by its age. It is made true by what it does in the lives of the people who practice it.
What is old in the Craft is real: the turning year, the moon, the plants, the fire, and the human need to mark them. What is new was made with care by people who loved those things. You are free to honor both.