Wicca is a spiritual path into worlds of wonder. It’s a path into your inner world, where real magic begins; a path into the Other World, where spirits live; a path that brings you back home transformed, empowered and able to see the Sacred in the world.
The journey will open your awareness and your heart, heal and reconnect you to the divine context in which you live. The ordinary becomes extraordinary and the extraordinary becomes possible because Creation is divine. That’s when magic begins to awaken within you and to manifest all around you.
The roots of Wicca are ancestral, but its revival is perfectly timed and speaks to the very heart of our modern lives and longings, challenges and destiny. Wicca is deeply personal and simultaneously universal. The practices are simple and the results are profound.
Wicca has no holy book, no prophet or institution dictating what to believe or how to practice. There’s no single definition, no One True Way. Wicca honors and encourages individual approaches, experiences and conclusions. Throughout our journey together, I encourage you to trust your intuition, your feelings, your experiences, as you find your way – the way that works for you.
Wicca is a path of personal spiritual practice, responsibility and revelation. But you’re not alone. Though each of us has our own unique path, we’re all traveling in the same sacred landscape, and there’s always a teacher, a guide, a spirit along the way. In the midst of extraordinary individuality and diversity, there are essential spiritual practices and principles that we all seem to share. We have similar experiences, celebrate the same seasonal holy days (Sabbats) and lunar rhythms (Esbats), and ultimately, we come to remarkably similar insights about divinity, Nature and human nature. There’s an essential sacred wisdom we share and that we call Wicca.
To really understand contemporary Wicca, its wisdom and practices, what you’ll be doing and why, it’s important to understand where it comes from. There’s been no small effort and controversy in understanding Wicca’s origins and evolution. All religions have myths about their beginnings, but in the case of Wicca, the reality is more fascinating than the myth. There are reasons that Wicca is called the Craft of the Wise.
The word itself is a great place to start. Wicca arrived in Britain with the Anglo-Saxons in the mid-5th century, but it was already a lot older. Its roots go back some 5,500 years, to the most widely spoken language in the world, called Proto-Indo-European, and the word weid. Weid means ‘to see’ or ‘to know,’ and it’s also the root of the Old English wisean, ‘to make wise or knowing.’ There are also roots to divination, or speaking with divinity. Originally, wicca was male and wicce female. Now we use Wiccan (capitalized) as a non-gender specific term and Wicca to refer to the spirituality.
How did Wicca get connected to Witch? Simple: the pronunciation of wicce is witch-a and in the 16th century, the Modern English spelling became witch. But the origin of both words provides a very different portrait from the negative stereotype of the evil, Satan-worshipping hag, and reminds us that there were Indigenous traditions in England, and in fact, throughout Europe and the Fertile Crescent (the Middle East), long before the arrival of Christianity and the vicious stereotype.
A Wiccan is a wise one who knows and
sees the Sacred. Until a few hundred years
ago, Wiccans were a village’s shamans.
Wicca is rooted in shamanism, humanity’s oldest spirituality. Some call it the Old Religion. Today shamanism is still practiced throughout the world by around 370 million Indigenous (First, Native or Aboriginal) peoples, despite centuries of brutal colonial domination.
We don’t often think of Europe as having Indigenous peoples, yet the majority of Europe’s inhabitants are considered to be Indigenous; however, the contemporary practice of ancestral traditions – as seen with the Sami people of northern Scandinavia and the Basque of northern Spain and southern France – is rare. Modern Wiccans and others are just now rediscovering, reviving and reconstructing the traditions of their Indigenous forebears.
And a modern form of core shamanism, composed of essential practices common to many shamanic traditions but without specific cultural overlays, is being increasingly practiced by the modern descendants of immigrants from Europe, Russia, Africa and elsewhere who are also rediscovering their Indigenous ancestral traditions.
All over the world, shamans serve similar roles. S/he is the village’s healer, the midwife of babies, lost souls and souls that have passed, the conductor of ceremony, celebration and rites of passage. S/he is the interpreter of dreams and signs, the journeyer between worlds, the keeper and revealer of Mysteries. Shamans travel backward and forward in time, between Spirit realms and back home again, bringing healing and help for themselves, others and the world. Shamanic wisdom traditions are deeply connected to the Earth, to the place where people live, to the spirit of place – the genius loci in Latin – and especially to the spirit of wild places where people do not live.
Everything has a spirit, and shamans work with the spirits of Air, Fire, Water and especially Mother Earth. They know that all beings are related, that animals are teachers, plants are healers and helpers, and there are guardian spirits, power animals, spirit helpers, ancestors and allies who will assist us.
If there’s one central wisdom at the heart
of shamanism, and Wicca, it is that all of
life is sacred. There’s one common reality
with no separation between Spirit and
Nature, divinity and humanity, humanity
and Nature. All is connected, all is One.
Shamans are masters of balancing, harmonizing and uniting inner and outer, the visible and invisible, the Spirit and the world. Across the globe, shamans use similar techniques to open themselves to the Sacred and to live in harmony with Nature. They shift and open their consciousness with ecstatic practices like drumming, chanting, dancing, journeying, praying, vision-seeking, communion with holy plants, working with natural energies and elements, ritual and ceremony.
Many years ago, when I first began to practice Wicca and core shamanism simultaneously, the ecstatic practices that shifted my perception and enabled me to move into the Other World (non-ordinary reality) were incredibly important and powerful. They changed my understanding of the nature of reality, confirmed experiences I’d had and restored spiritual abilities I didn’t know I had. A new dimension, a world of Spirit, opened to me. It changed my life.
As I simultaneously attended my weekly Wiccan circle and my weekly shamanic circle, I recognized the similarities: working in circle, honoring the directions and working with the elements, honoring Mother Earth, Father Sun and the Moon, the seasonal shifts and lunar rhythms – practices that opened my consciousness – and ecstatic practices like dancing and chanting, as well as the offering of thanks and much more.
Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate that shamans are also seers of the Sacred in the world we live in every day, and especially the natural world. At this precarious moment when the future is imperiled because of our blindness to Creation’s innate divinity, this may be one of the greatest gifts of shamanism, and Wicca. Though continuity has been broken, especially in Europe, and many traditions and a lot of wisdom has been lost, the essential sources of that wisdom remain. We have the same great spiritual teacher, our Mother Earth, the same essential shamanic practices (core shamanism), the helping spirits, and the same innate ability to experience the Sacred.
Not everyone becomes a shaman, but anyone can practice shamanism. Not everyone becomes a Priest/ess, but anyone can practice Wicca. Yet for hundreds of years, practicing Wicca, practicing Witchcraft or even being accused of being a wicce could get you killed.
Tragically, what we (Western colonizers) did to other Indigenous peoples, we did first to ourselves. The arrival of Christianity throughout Europe occurred gradually and often violently, assimilating and obliterating the existing Indigenous traditions.
The Witchcraze, or Burning Times, started in the late 1300s and finally ended 500 years later in the early 1800s. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII published a papal edict authorizing the use of torture to elicit confessions of Witchcraft (which has yet to be rescinded). Two years later, two German monks published a handbook called the Malleus Maleficarum, an anti-woman screed on how to fulfill the Pope’s orders, and in 1542, Pope Paul III established the Holy Office of the Inquisition (which also continues to this day).
Mostly women, but also children and men, were accused of practicing Witchcraft, consorting with the Devil, causing the climate’s sudden cooling and casting evil spells to harm livestock, crops and humans. They were imprisoned, tortured and murdered by religious and secular institutions. The terror spread across the Atlantic, where 25 women and men were executed as Witches in colonial North America, and the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions brought terror to Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.
The Witchcraze has been called the women’s holocaust. A mere accusation could lead to death, and during this prolonged terror women lost all rights to personal control or autonomy. They weren’t allowed to learn to read, let alone receive an education. They couldn’t inherit or own property and were themselves considered the property of their father, brother or husband. Their traditional roles as shamans and healers, midwives and wise women who were central to the spiritual and physical wellbeing of their villages either disappeared, went underground or shape-shifted into a more socially acceptable form, as it did for their male counterparts and their traditions.
Some academics have disputed that the Witchcraze was a persecution of practicing Witches, but other scholars, like Carlo Ginzburg, argue that the trial transcripts, along with other evidence, confirm the existence and suppression of Indigenous, shamanic traditions practiced by benandanti and streghe, wicce, noaidi, gonagas, volur, seidkonur, tietaja and others throughout Europe.
Shards of Europe’s shamanic practices survived, morphing into folk traditions, herbal lore or even Church calendars and saintly figures, with bits of magic discreetly practiced today by the women who go to Church on Sunday or the men who dance on village greens on May Day.
But painful reverberations of this persecution continue for women, and men, for the Earth and Spirit, with lingering mischaracterizations of Wicca, and Witches, and ongoing constraints on women’s freedom, power and spiritual roles, and with devastating impact on the Earth and our souls. Today, violence continues with the torture and murder of accused Witches in once-colonized Africa, India, Nepal and elsewhere.
Despite this brutal history, Wicca has reemerged, and there’s an aura of magic about its return.
In the early 1930s, a remarkable group of English iconoclasts went looking for the religion of their ancestors. Why that moment? Perhaps it was a reaction to 100 years of the Industrial Revolution, with its damage to land and people, and the punishing effects of World War I and the Great Depression.
Inspiration may also have come from the counterculture of Romantics, Spiritualists, Suffragists, Theosophists and the esoteric, magical movement made famous by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – a metaphysical society founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with such prestigious members as Lady Gregory and the poet W.B. Yeats – all looking for a different kind of divinity that included the Feminine Principle. Or maybe it was Mother Earth calling her children home.
These intrepid souls lived in the midst of massive stone circles, colossal mounds and chalk giants carved into hillsides, stories of fairies and myths of Avalon, the Green Knight and Sir Gawain, seasonal stag-antlered dances and the faces of Green Men carved in churches, Goddesses named Bride, Brigid and Brigantia, from whom some say the name Britain came, and Gods of the forest such as Cernunnos and Herne. There was seasonal rejoicing remembered in local folk traditions and preserved within the Christian calendar, and old Gods and Goddesses thinly disguised as saints. Everything was amber in which proof of an earlier life resided.
There was also the revolutionary theory of a brilliant Egyptologist and Suffragist, Dr. Margaret Murray, the ‘grandmother of Wicca.’ Murray’s book, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, published by Oxford University Press in 1921, argued that Witchcraft had been a pan-European religion with beliefs, ritual and organization as highly developed as that of any. Though largely discredited years later, Murray had hit upon signs of something sacred in England, and Europe, before Christianity.
Whatever the inspiration, it’s difficult to retrieve a religion from shattered shards and a bad reputation. However, three covens, or groups, appeared in England: in Hampshire’s New Forest and in Norfolk and Cheshire. The covens were discreet and hidden, but in 1951, the Witchcraft Law of 1735 was repealed and Witchcraft burst into the public’s awareness in the person of Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant who said he’d been initiated by the New Forest coven.
Gardner wrote several of the first books on Witchcraft by a practitioner and spoke publicly and to the press – no small feat given the lingering stereotypes. And he worked with some of the most important women in Wicca, like Doreen Valiente, the coven’s High Priestess. Valiente wrote the famous Goddess invocation The Charge of the Goddess, and she and Gardner fleshed out the rites and practices that formed the foundation of the Gardnerian tradition.
Gardner claimed that he practiced the religion Murray had described, calling it Wicca, and her theory became Wicca’s well-accepted ‘myth of origin.’ Years later, after careful scrutiny, historians and practitioners concluded that the Gardnerian tradition was not an unbroken, hereditary, pan-European tradition matching Murray’s theory.
Gardner and Valiente had woven a creative and effective magic carpet from Murray’s theory, surviving elements of Euro-Indigenous traditions – including Anglo-Saxon and Celtic influences, folk practices and lore – classical scholarship and Western Mystery, hermetic and esoteric schools, Freemasonry, even aspects of Eastern wisdom.
Today, many still subscribe to Murray’s theory as literal truth, but other Wiccans appreciate her recognition of archetypal truths that continue to resonate – a Great Mother Goddess, a Horned God of forest and field, a small community organized into groups (covens) with trained Priestesses and Priests, the use of ecstatic practices, the celebration of seasonal holy days and lunar rites, initiation rites and the keeping of a book of wisdom called the Book of Shadows.
Whether there were surviving, hidden and hereditary traditions or an inspired new religious movement with ancient roots had been born, Gardner offered the world spiritual techniques and insights that people valued and needed – most notably feminine divinity, spiritual leadership for women, spiritual practices providing personal experiences of an immanent divinity, reverence for the Earth and attunement with Nature’s wisdom. And real, divine magic.
Wicca took root and began to grow beyond the British Isles with the rediscovery of other forgotten Euro-Indigenous traditions and pantheons of deities from faiths that existed before the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), especially Goddesses, which were integrated into Wiccan practice and cosmology. Women found a spiritual home that honored them as spiritual leaders; publishing and the internet connected people and provided support, community and access to once hidden information; leaders who were unafraid of persecution emerged into the public eye to challenge stereotypes; and the movement grew and spawned a broader revival of Euro-Indigenous and modern ‘Pagan’ traditions.
Today, there are many variations and diverse lineages and traditions in Wicca, each with its own organizational structure. Many have incorporated as religious organizations, churches or temples and, while the law and academics now recognize Wicca as a religion, many practitioners prefer the term spirituality. In formal surveys, the number of adherents of Wicca varies from a few hundred thousand to several million globally. Wiccans are lawyers, doctors, rock stars, truck drivers, dog trainers and Unitarian ministers and as likely to be your neighbor next door as your dentist. Wiccans are, literally, everywhere.
Wicca’s legitimacy does not need to be derived from its past but from the profound, transformative spiritual experiences, insights and values it offers practitioners every day. In this sense, Wicca is a new religious movement, and its (re)birth is one of the most rare and significant events in human history.
What do so many people believe?
One of the first things I loved about Wicca was that I wasn’t asked to believe anything. I wasn’t asked to accept anyone else’s word for who God is, or isn’t, or what God wants me to do or not do, or even if there is a God. I wasn’t asked to believe in a Goddess either. Honestly, I’d have run out the door if anyone had said ‘Just believe.’
The Priestesses simply started practicing. They didn’t explain what they were doing or why they were doing it. It was unfamiliar, and frankly, it made me uncomfortable. But the part of me that responded to beauty and poetry, music and movement, that was curious and open to joy, that was a feminist, that trusted my instincts and my heart, the part of me that had been called, all those unschooled and wise parts of me experienced something I’d never felt before: the extraordinary and divine energy generated when women (and men) come together in a circle and honor the Divine as not just male but female. I kept going back and the feeling kept growing.
I felt it as I cast circles alone in my tiny studio apartment in Manhattan, danced beneath a full Moon, or meditated in the new ways I’d learned in circle. I felt my own energies – my mental focus, my emotions, even my body – shifting with the changing Moon and cycling seasons. When my menstrual cycle moved into rhythm with the Moon and the other women in my circle, I experienced my periods not as a messy or uncomfortable inconvenience but as part of my life-giving power, and I noticed what I’d always ignored – a heightened psychic sensitivity that I learned to honor and cultivate.
I began to understand the meaning of the words and gestures, the names and gifts of the Goddesses and Gods from all over the world, the wisdom waiting within the natural world around and within me. I could feel the life, joy and love flowing all around and through me. I felt my spirit coming alive and I recognized the Spirit living in the world around me. It felt like magic. And it felt utterly natural. Turns out, Wiccans don’t believe in God or Goddess any more than you believe in air or a tree or the dog, or cat, lying beside you.
Wicca is a wisdom tradition and a system of spiritual practices that anyone can master, regardless of their age, gender, race, culture or even religion. Wicca is a path of personal enlightenment, empowerment and responsibility. Your experiences with the Sacred, your visions and insights, will be as unique as you are.
But it’s not a subjective reality. As you work, especially with others, you’ll find you’re having similar experiences, encounters and insights. And your visions and experiences will be confirmed by the living universe. Your confidence will grow. Most wonderful of all, even at its most extraordinary and magical, practicing Wicca feels like you’re remembering something you already knew, awakening a divine gift that’s utterly natural, coming home to a divinity that was there all along.
Finding yourself in the presence of the Sacred changes everything; finding the Sacred present within yourself changes you. Some changes happen in an instant, as if you really did wave a magic wand or chant magic words. But other changes take time and patience – you can’t make the grass grow by tugging on it.
Change takes self-awareness, courage and effort. You have to change cultural and childhood conditioning that gets in the way of your dreams, your gifts, your purpose – and that may include lingering stereotypes about Witches. That’s a lot of work. But Wicca gives you the tools, wisdom and magic to do that work.
Realizing you’re living in a sacred world also means you have to be very brave and really look at what’s wrong in the world around us: why it’s wounded and out of balance. You have to take responsibility to help fix what human beings have broken, to heal what we’ve wounded. That’s really a lot of work. And it can be very difficult because most of the world’s cultures are blind and indifferent to the divinity embodied by Creation.
The social and environmental crises we’ve created are all symptoms of our mistaken belief that the Divine either doesn’t exist or exists ‘out there,’ somewhere else, and that Spirit is transcendent ‘light’ beyond the world and the bodies in which we live. But everything we need is within and all around us. The Sacred is within and all around us. The practices unleash that life-transforming, sustaining and empowering connection, and there are spirits and guides all along the way to help us.
To practice Wicca is to become a wise one – the one who sees and moves between the worlds knowing that the worlds are one, that the realm of Spirit is the soul of the world and the world embodies that Spirit. That is the key to unlocking the real, divine magic of life. The invisible will become visible, and the visible numinous.