Wicca came into public view in England in the early 1950s. Where it came from before that is a question on which witches and historians have spent seventy years, and the honest answer has two parts.
The first part is what can be documented. A retired civil servant named Gerald Gardner published two books in the 1950s describing a religion of witchcraft, founded a coven in Hertfordshire, initiated a number of gifted people, and by the time of his death in 1964 had set in motion something that has since spread across the world. The second part is what Gardner said lay behind it: that he had been initiated in 1939 into a coven of hereditary witches in the New Forest, the last remnant of a pagan religion that had survived in secret since before Christianity. The first part is history. The second is the founding story of the Craft, and it has to be weighed with care.
The ground it grew from
Wicca did not come from nowhere. By the time Gardner retired to England in 1936, the materials for a pagan religion of witchcraft had been accumulating for a century.
The Romantic movement had taught the English to see nature as holy and the old gods, Pan above all, as figures of longing. Folklorists had spent two generations collecting seasonal customs, charms and tales, and many of them believed that these were fragments of a pre-Christian religion. In 1890 James Frazer published The Golden Bough, with its dying and reviving god of vegetation. In 1899 the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland published Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, which he presented as the scripture of a surviving Italian witch cult devoted to the goddess Diana.
The most important single influence was Margaret Murray, an Egyptologist, whose book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe appeared in 1921. Murray argued that the people tried as witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been members of an organised pagan religion, meeting in covens of thirteen, keeping seasonal festivals and worshipping a horned god. Her theory was widely believed, though never by the specialists in the trial records, for forty years.
Alongside all this ran the occult revival. The ceremonial magic orders of the 1890s had developed elaborate rituals involving cast circles, the four elements and consecrated tools. The fraternal lodges had made degrees of initiation, passwords and oaths familiar to hundreds of thousands of Englishmen. Aleister Crowley had written a body of ritual poetry. And between the wars there was a wide enthusiasm for naturism, woodcraft and the open air.
Gerald Gardner and the New Forest
In 1938 Gardner and his wife moved to Highcliffe, on the south coast at the edge of the New Forest. There he joined an amateur Rosicrucian theatre company at nearby Christchurch, and among its members he found a small group of people who, by his account, took him into their confidence. In September 1939, he said, he was initiated into their coven at the house of a well-to-do local woman, Dorothy Clutterbuck. He was also close to another member of the circle, Edith Woodford-Grimes, known in the Craft as Dafo, who worked with him for years afterwards.
Gardner told one story of the coven in the New Forest that has passed into legend. At Lammas 1940, with invasion expected daily, the witches are said to have met in the Forest and raised a great cone of power, directing at the mind of the enemy the thought that he could not cross the sea. Several of the older members, Gardner said, died soon afterwards from the exertion.
He was at first forbidden to write openly about what he had found. He put some of it into a novel, High Magic's Aid, in 1949. A fuller account of his life is on the page about Gerald Gardner.
Into the open, 1951 to 1964
In 1951 the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was repealed. That Act had not made witchcraft itself a crime. It had made it an offence to pretend to magical powers, and it had been used chiefly against fraudulent fortune-tellers and mediums. Its repeal nonetheless removed the last statute with the word witchcraft in its title, and Gardner took it as leave to speak.
The same year a museum of magic and witchcraft opened at Castletown on the Isle of Man. Gardner became its resident witch, bought it in 1954 and lived there for the rest of his life. In 1954 he published Witchcraft Today, with an introduction by Margaret Murray, announcing that the witch cult was not dead and that he was a member of it. The Meaning of Witchcraft followed in 1959.
By then he had a coven of his own, meeting in Hertfordshire. At Midsummer 1953 he initiated Doreen Valiente, who became his High Priestess and rewrote much of the coven's ritual book in the form in which it is still used. Gardner enjoyed the attention of the newspapers more than some of his initiates did, and in 1957 Valiente and others left him over it. He went on to initiate a new generation of High Priestesses, and it is through them, and through those who stayed, that every Gardnerian line now living descends. He died at sea on 12 February 1964.
What historians have found
Since the 1970s the origins of Wicca have been studied closely, first by scholars within the Craft and from the 1990s by professional historians. Their main conclusions are now widely accepted, and we think any honest account must state them.
- The witch cult of Margaret Murray did not exist. Her theory depended on selective quotation from the trial records, and no historian of the witch trials now accepts it. The people who were hanged and burned were not members of a pagan religion.
- The rites that Gardner published and passed on have identifiable sources. They draw on an old handbook of ceremonial magic called the Key of Solomon, on the rituals of the fraternal lodges and the Victorian magical orders, on Leland's Aradia, on the writings of Aleister Crowley and on English poetry. Much of the present wording is the work of Doreen Valiente.
- There probably was a group in the New Forest. Research into the people Gardner named has shown that they were real, that they knew one another and that several had occult interests. What cannot be shown is that their practice was older than they were. The likeliest reading is that a small circle of friends, steeped in the ideas of their time, believed they were reviving the old witch religion, and that Gardner received the beginnings of the Craft from them and built upon them.
So Wicca is not a survival. It is a religion made in the twentieth century from materials that are in some cases very old, by people who sincerely believed they were restoring something. One of our own members has written about what it is like to hold that knowledge and remain a witch, in a Journal essay called The Old Religion and the Honest Historian.
The Craft spreads
In the early 1960s a Manchester man named Alex Sanders obtained initiation and a copy of the Gardnerian rites. With his wife, who was his High Priestess, he built a following in London, and the tradition that grew from their work became known as the Alexandrian. It is very close to the Gardnerian in its rites and has long since been reconciled with it.
In 1963 an Englishman living in America, Raymond Buckland, travelled to Scotland to be initiated by one of Gardner's High Priestesses, and took the Craft back to Long Island. From that one coven Gardnerian Wicca spread across the United States. America then gave Wicca forms its founder never imagined: feminist covens that honoured the Goddess alone, open and eclectic groups, and from the late 1970s a flood of books that taught readers to practise by themselves.
By the end of the century most Wiccans in the world had never been initiated into a coven. The story of that branching is told on the page about the traditions of Wicca.
A short chronology
- 1890 James Frazer publishes The Golden Bough.
- 1899 Charles Godfrey Leland publishes Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches.
- 1921 Margaret Murray publishes The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.
- 1936 Gerald Gardner retires from government service in Malaya and returns to England.
- 1939 Gardner, by his own account, is initiated into a coven in the New Forest.
- 1949 Gardner publishes the novel High Magic's Aid.
- 1951 The Witchcraft Act of 1735 is repealed.
- 1953 Doreen Valiente is initiated at Midsummer.
- 1954 Gardner publishes Witchcraft Today.
- 1958 The solstices and equinoxes are given equal standing with the four older Sabbats, completing the Wheel of the Year.
- 1959 Gardner publishes The Meaning of Witchcraft.
- 1963 Raymond Buckland is initiated in Scotland and carries the Craft to the United States.
- 1964 Gerald Gardner dies at sea on 12 February.
- Later 1960s The Alexandrian tradition takes shape around Alex Sanders and his wife.
- 1970s Seax-Wica, Dianic Wicca and many other new traditions are founded, most of them in America.
- 1999 Doreen Valiente dies in Brighton on 1 September.
How we hold this history
We were taught the old story with love, by people who had been taught it the same way. We now know more than they did. It has not made the Craft less to us. A religion is not made false by being young, and it is not made true by being old. What Gardner and his friends put together in the 1940s and 1950s has since given three generations of people a way of meeting the gods, marking the year and facing death, and it is on that record that it ought to be judged.