Wicca | Definition, History, Beliefs, & Facts - Britannica

Origins and development

Although there are precursors to the movement, Wicca’s origins can be traced to a retired British civil servant, Gerald Brosseau Gardner (1884–1964). Gardner spent most of his career in Asia, where he became familiar with various indigenous religious traditions. He also read widely in Western esoteric literature, including the writings of the British occultist Aleister Crowley. Upon returning to Britain in the 1930s, Gardner became involved in the British occult community and claimed to have discovered a group of witches operating near England’s New Forest in 1939. He later alleged that it was their teachings that provided the basis of Wicca, although historians disagree on whether the New Forest group ever existed. If it did, it likely formed earlier in the 1930s. Following the 1951 repeal of Britain’s archaic witchcraft laws, Gardner published Witchcraft Today (1954), founded his first coven of followers, and, with the assistance of high priestess Doreen Valiente (1922–99), developed what became known as Gardnerian Wicca.

Other occultists drew on Gardner’s writings and on other texts about witchcraft to establish their own Wiccan traditions during the 1950s and ’60s. All typically claimed to be practicing a pre-Christian witchcraft religion that had clandestinely survived for centuries, although these claims were dismissed by historians following greater research into early modern witchcraft during the 1960s and ’70s. Among the most prominent of these occultists was the Englishman Alexander Sanders (1926–88), who founded Alexandrian Wicca, and the California-based Victor Anderson (1917–2001) and Cora Anderson (1915–2008), who spearheaded the Feri tradition. By the 1960s the word Wicca had emerged as a general term for this new religion, although there was some internal contestation as to its specific applicability.

Wicca’s rapid spread through the United States during the 1960s and ’70s was part of the broader countercultural zeitgeist, and many of those Americans joining Wicca were also influenced by the new social movements of the period. Informed by second-wave feminism, Dianic Wicca was formed in 1971 by Hungarian émigré Zsuzsanna Budapest (born 1940) as a women’s tradition placing central focus on the goddess. Drawing on the gay rights movement, the Minoan Brotherhood was established in 1977 by Eddie Buczynski (1947–89) as a Wiccan tradition for gay and bisexual men. Growing environmentalist sentiment also had an impact on Wicca, which by the 1970s was increasingly presenting itself as a “nature religion.” Radical left-wing politics came to the fore in the work of Starhawk (born 1951), an American practitioner who helped establish the Reclaiming tradition in San Francisco and wrote an influential book, The Spiral Dance (1979). Although many of Wicca’s early exponents espoused conservative and right-wing views, by the close of the 20th century the Wiccan community had come to be numerically dominated by people with progressive and left-leaning opinions.

As well as influencing other modern Pagan groups, such as the Church of All Worlds and modern Druidry, Wiccans played a prominent role in establishing organizations to defend Neo-Pagan civil rights, such as the U.K.-based Pagan Federation and the U.S.-based Covenant of the Goddess. These groups repeatedly challenged the erroneous perception that Wiccans were Satanists—a notion, promoted by certain Evangelical Christians, that proved particularly dangerous amid the Satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s and early ’90s.

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During the religion’s first two decades, most people who joined Wicca did so through initiation into a preexisting coven. From the 1970s, however, a growing number of books were published that taught readers how to initiate themselves into Wicca, resulting in rapid growth in the number of solitary practitioners. Wicca’s growing public visibility led the creators of such American films and television shows as The Craft (1996), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), and Charmed (1998–2006) to draw on Wiccan terminology in depicting fictional witches. The popularity of these media portrayals fueled a teenage Wiccan subculture during the 1990s and 2000s, and a second surge in teenage interest arose in the 2010s, informed largely by social media. These tendencies were met with a mixed reception from more-established practitioners, some of whom felt that the popularizations trivialized the religion. Reacting to the changing image of Wicca, from the early 1990s onward, growing numbers of practitioners rebranded themselves as “traditional witches,” a term that was, confusingly, also employed by adherents of various non-Wiccan forms of occultism, such as Luciferianism.