Wicca has no creed. It is a religion of practice and experience before it is one of belief, and yet there are things that nearly every Wiccan would recognise as their own.
Ask ten witches what they believe and you may well get eleven answers. Wicca has no catechism and no authority empowered to write one. A person becomes a witch by initiation, or by dedication and practice, and not by assenting to a list of propositions.
All the same, the Craft is not a blank. Its rites assume certain things about the world, and nobody could work them for long without coming to share most of those assumptions. This page sets out the ones that nearly all Wiccans hold in common. The pages that follow take the most important of them in turn.
The divine is here
The gods of Wicca do not stand outside the world and rule it. They are within it: in the land and the sky, in birth and growth and decay, and in the men and women who call on them. Theologians call this immanence. Witches are more likely to say simply that the earth is holy.
It follows that nature is not a resource or a backdrop. It is the body of the divine, and a witch's first religious duty is to pay attention to it: to know the phase of the moon, to notice when the swifts arrive, to mind what happens to the fields and rivers of their own district.
The divine is both female and male
Wicca honours a Goddess and a God. At the time the Craft appeared, a religion that addressed the divine as She, and gave a woman the leading part in its rites, was very nearly without parallel in the English-speaking world. It remains one of the things that draws people to Wicca, women and men alike.
The two are understood as partners, each necessary to the other, and their meeting is the pattern on which the rites are made.
The year is a sacred story
The eight Sabbats of the Wheel of the Year are not merely a calendar. Taken together they tell of the sun's birth at midwinter, his growth, his marriage to the Goddess in spring, his death with the harvest and his return. Witches differ over the details of the tale, and it was never laid down in one fixed form. What matters is the habit it teaches, of seeing one's own life as part of the same round: growth, fruiting, decline, rest and return.
Magic is real
Wiccans believe that will and imagination, rightly trained and directed, can have effects in the world. They call this magic, and they practise it. The belief is held in different ways. For some it is a matter of subtle forces not yet described by science. For others it is a way of working on oneself that then works outward through ordinary means. Either way it is done seriously, and within strict ethical bounds.
We are answerable for what we do
The ethic of the Craft is given in the Wiccan Rede: an it harm none, do what ye will. There is no list of sins in Wicca, and nobody to absolve them. In their place is the plain understanding that actions have consequences, that these return upon the one who acts, and that each person must weigh for themselves what their conduct will do to others.
Death is not the end
Most Wiccans believe in rebirth. The dead rest, and return. There is no judgement and no damnation in the Craft's teaching, and so there is no fear to be played upon. The dead are remembered with love, above all at Samhain, and are thought of as not far away.
The body and its joys are good
Wicca does not regard the flesh as a hindrance to the spirit. Food, wine, music, dancing, laughter and love are gifts of the gods and ways of honouring them. In the words of the Charge of the Goddess, "all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals". This is not licence. It carries with it a duty to see that the love and the pleasure are real, which is to say freely given and freely shared.
No one has the whole truth
Wiccans do not believe that theirs is the only true religion, and find the idea of an only true religion puzzling. The gods have many names and have been met by many peoples in many ways. For this reason the Craft does not seek converts. It holds that those who belong to it will find their way to it, and it wishes everyone else well on their own road.
What Wicca does not teach
It may help to say what is absent. Wicca has no doctrine of original sin and no need of salvation. It has no Devil and no hell. It has no holy book whose words settle arguments. It does not hold that spirit is good and matter evil, or that men are nearer the divine than women, or that human beings were given the earth to do with as they please.
Belief and experience
One last point is perhaps the most important. For most witches these are not beliefs in the sense of opinions held on someone's authority. They are conclusions drawn from what happens in the circle. A witch who says that the Goddess is real is generally not reporting a doctrine. She is telling you about a night when the High Priestess turned from the altar and it was not quite the High Priestess who spoke.
That is why the Craft can be so easy about differences of theology. The experience is what is shared. The explanations are each person's own.