1 What''s Wicca? Recently my husband and I went to a coffee house to meet a man who was interested in becoming a student in our Wiccan study group. Like many Wiccans who lead teaching groups, we always arrange for our first meeting with a seeker-someone searching for his or her spiritual path-to be in a public place, for everyone''s safety and comfort. Over tea, we asked the seeker why he wanted Wiccan training. We ask everyone who talks to us about training this question. If they tell us they are looking for a nature-based religion, a path of self-empowerment, a way to commune with deity, or something along those lines, we continue the conversation. If they tell us they want to hex their ex-lovers, brew cauldrons full of toxic stuff, make others fall in love with them, worship the devil, or fly on broomsticks, we tell them they''re out of luck and politely suggest that they seek out a therapist. When we asked the question of this seeker, he told us about how he had searched for information about Wicca in books and on the Internet, attended public Wiccan rituals, and visited metaphysical bookstores, but there was so much information available on the topic that he wasn''t sure what was Wicca and what was not. He was also at a loss about how to separate the spiritual stuff from the rest.
As he put it, "I know there''s got to be a religion in there somewhere." He decided to find a teacher to help him sort it all out. It was easy to understand why he was confused. During the last several years, Wicca and magic have stormed the American pop culture scene. We''ve been watching Bewitched for quite a while, but Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the Harry Potter films, The Lord of the Rings, Charmed, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have spurred a new wave of seekers, despite the fact that most of these shows and films have precious little to do with real Wicca. It''s gotten to the point where someone has coined the term "Generation Hex" for all of the teenagers and twenty-somethings who have been turned on to Wicca by the current magical media blitz. There are more Wicca books on the market than ever, and more than 6,000 Wicca-related Web sites on the Internet. There are Wiccan radio shows, Wiccan umbrella organizations, and state-certified Wiccan churches.
And there''s even Secret Spells Barbie, complete with glittery costume, cauldron, and "magic" powder. Okay, technically she''s not Wiccan, but she definitely contributes to the confusion. With all of this sudden popularity, you''d think that Wicca and magic had finally made it into the mainstream. For better or worse, this isn''t true. The Wicca media glut has only given people more false, confusing, and contradictory ideas about what Wicca is. Although it''s probable that more people are familiar with the word "Wicca" than ever before, there is no cohesive, accurate image of Wiccans in pop culture. Thanks to films and prime-time television, Wiccans may have "graduated" from the green-faced hag with the pointy hat to sexy women with navel rings in scanty clothes who help others with their "powers," but this is not a more accurate portrayal (there are plenty of male Wiccans, for one thing), and it''s not an improvement. Even Wiccans get confused about what Wicca is sometimes.
In the Wiccan community there is a lot of discussion (okay, arguing) about what makes a Wiccan. I''m not going to jump into that fray here. Instead, I want this book to give you a broad-based understanding of Wicca so you can decide what the truth is for yourself. For the purpose of this book, here are some definitions: *A Wiccan is a person who is following the Wiccan religion/spiritual path and has either undergone a Wiccan initiation or has formally and ritually declared him- or herself Wiccan. *Some Wiccans use the words "Wiccan" and "witch" interchangeably, but there are witches who do not consider themselves Wiccans. Wiccans are a subgroup of witches. *Wiccans and witches are both subgroups of a larger group: pagans. Pagans are practitioners of earth-based religions.
Most Wiccans and witches consider themselves pagan, but not all pagans are Wiccans or witches. Christians sometimes call anyone who is not a Christian, Muslim, or Jew a pagan, but we''re not going with that definition. *In this book, when I use the term "witchcraft," I''m referring to what Wiccans and witches do: religious ritual and spell work. I use the term "Wicca" to refer to the religion itself. So, just what is Wicca? There are a lot of answers to that question. Here are a few of the more widely accepted ones. Wicca Is a "New Old" Religion Wicca is a new religion that combines surviving folk traditions and more modern elements. It is loosely based on Western European pagan rites and rituals that have been performed for centuries-before, during, and after the time of Jesus-such as reverence of nature, observance of the cycle of the seasons, celebration of the harvest, and doing magic.
Some of the structure of these old rites still survives in Wicca, but most of the religion''s structure and many of its practices are more modern. Some of the framework of the religion is culled from medieval grimoires (books of magic), occult organizations such as the Golden Dawn, and techniques that today''s Wiccans make up on the fly because they suit their purposes or the situation. Wicca is a living, evolving religion. Wicca isn''t the same thing as the kind of witchcraft you read about in most of the history books, but the histories of the two are intertwined. Witchcraft, in some form or another, has probably been around as long as people have been. Certainly it''s mentioned in classical literature, like in the stories of Medea and Circe, and of course in documents of the early Christian Church. One of the earliest and most famous church documents about witchcraft is the Canon Episcopi, which had a profound and long-lasting impact on the philosophy of Christians toward witchcraft and paganism. It was incorporated into canon law in the twelfth century, but it is believed to be much older (one possible year of origin is AD 906).
The Canon said, essentially, that witchcraft was an illusion that originated in dreams, and to believe in it was heresy, or against the teachings of the church. A famous section of the Canon states: Certain abandoned women, perverted by Satan, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and openly profess that, in the dead of night, they ride upon certain beasts with the pagan goddess Diana, with a countless horde of women, and in the silence of the dead of the night to traverse great spaces of earth, and obey her commands as their mistress . but it were well if they alone perished in their infidelity and did not draw so many others along with them into the pit of their faithlessness. For an innumerable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe this to be true, and so believing, wander from right faith and relapse into pagan errors when they think there is any divinity or power except the one God.1 The idea that believing in witchcraft and paganism was heresy persisted until the reign of Pope Innocent VIII, who issued Summis desiderantes affectibus, a papal bull reversing the Canon and stating that witchcraft did exist and that to perform it was heresy. Although several church letters advocating positions that would reverse the Canon Episcopi had been issued prior to Summis desiderantes affectibus, the new bull was most effective because it was published in 1484, around the time of the invention of the printing press, and attached as a prefix to the widely distributed Malleus Maleficarum, the infamous manual on finding, torturing, and prosecuting suspected witches, which was written by Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. This bull cleared the way for the Inquisition, the European witch hunts, and the deaths of thousands of people accused of the heresy of witchcraft. And along with the Malleus, it helped to solidify, codify, and spread several of the ideas that came to be associated closely with medieval witchcraft.
These included the notion that witches signed a pact with the devil (often solemnized by kissing his behind, something no self-respecting Wiccan would do). Of course, this made the consequences for witchcraft much more serious than they had been, and the witch hunts were born. Pre-Christian rites were considered superstition at best, and witchcraft or devil worship at worst, so, since witchcraft was now formally considered a heresy by the church, people who were accused of performing pagan rites were prosecuted. During the witch hunts, many European pre-Christian pagan traditions died out, took on a Catholic veneer, or went underground. Some of this would have happened even without the hunts, since traditions rarely last completely intact for thousands of years. However, pockets of pagan practice and vestiges of the "old ways" survived. We see remnants of some of them today in traditions like the Morris men and Maypole dancers in England. On one hand, this history of witchcraft and the church has nothing to do with Wicca.
The "Satanic witchcraft" that the church persecuted, if it ever even existed, was a Christian heresy that included a pact with the devil, black magic, human sacrifice, and other atrocities. Wiccans do not believe in Satan, Wicca is not a Christian heresy (it''s a religion unto itself), and Wiccans find black magic and human sacrifice as abhorrent as anyone else does. On the other hand, the impact that the history of Satanic witchcraft does have on Wiccans is twofold. First, the church equated even benevolent pre-Christian pagan practices, which are a root of modern Wicca, with Satanic witchcraft. Second, many people today still believe that Satanic witchcraft an.