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Witchcraft Past and Present
The Wiccan Way
In 1954, Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today in which he
advocated the use of old, long-established rituals and introduced many
of his own devising. Gardner venerated The Goddess and women in
general. He believed in the power of nature and that men and women
could tune into it to alter the course of things. Gardner’s work has,
according to several anthropologists, three direct links to ancient
paganism – the use of high magic, the use of plants and herbs in spells,
and the involvement of folk rites and customs to manipulate the
powers of nature.
Gardner’s work led to a revival in interest of the traditions of
witchcraft, not just in Britain, and he is credited by many as being the
founder of what has become an officially recognized new religion –
Wicca. Wicca honours The God and The Goddess (their names vary
from group to group) as the two main deities and followers worship
them in their rites and rituals.
Wicca spread and as it did, different groups developed their own rites
and rituals. In England, Celtic practices and Gardnerian belief are
blended together in the form of what has come to be known as British
Traditional Witchcraft. In the United States, where Gardner’s work was
introduced and developed by Raymond Buckland, Wicca has now
become an officially recognized religion.
Wicca has followers all over the world, wherever people feel a need to
turn from traditional religions and return to a more Earth-based one.
They practise various forms of white magic and perform rituals to
attune themselves with the natural rhythm of life forces, particularly
those marked by the phases of the moon and the four seasons.
Wiccans belong to a wider movement – neo-paganism, which as the
name suggests has its roots in Celtic paganism. But not all neo-pagans
are Wiccans: the term also refers to Druidism, New Age, shamanism,
Ceremonial Magick, the occult sciences, voodoo and the revival of any
pre-Christian mystery tradition.
The Wiccan Rede
Wiccans live by the Wiccan Rede, a simple benevolent moral code that
holds that as long as no one is harmed, ‘do what thy wilt’. One popular
version of the Rede, taught to her pupils by Dorothy Morrison, a
leading American Wiccan and High Priestess of the Georgian Tradition,
goes as follows:
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