Wicca has no creed. The nearest thing to one is a list of thirteen principles agreed by a short-lived council of American witches in the spring of 1974, which is still the most widely quoted statement of what Wiccans believe.
The Principles of Wiccan Belief were drawn up because witches in the United States were being asked, by journalists, by prison authorities, by the armed forces and by their neighbours, what it was that they actually believed, and had no agreed answer to give. They were not written as a statement of faith for witches to sign. They were written to explain the Craft to outsiders, and they do that better than most things written since.
The Council of American Witches
By the early 1970s Wicca had spread from Britain across the United States, where it had divided into many traditions and been joined by many independent groups, some of them only loosely connected with what Gerald Gardner had taught. In 1973 a number of their leaders formed a Council of American Witches, one of whose moving spirits was the Minnesota publisher Carl Weschcke. At a gathering in Minneapolis in April 1974 the council adopted the Principles.
The council itself did not last the year. Its members could agree on what they believed far more easily than on anything else, which will surprise nobody who has tried to get two covens to agree on anything. But the Principles outlived it. They were reprinted widely, were later included in a handbook on religious practice prepared for chaplains in the United States Army, and are still quoted, in Britain as well as America, whenever someone needs a short answer to the question of what Wiccans believe.
The thirteen principles
We give them here in summary and in our own words, in their original order. The full text is short, and is easily found in print.
- The rhythms of life. Witches keep rites that bring them into tune with the natural rhythms of life, marked by the phases of the moon and by the solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarter days of the year.
- Responsibility to nature. Human intelligence brings a particular responsibility towards the environment. Witches try to live in harmony with nature and in balance with the rest of life.
- A greater power. There is a depth of power far greater than most people are aware of. It is sometimes called supernatural, but witches see it as natural, and as latent in everyone.
- Polarity. The creative power of the universe shows itself through polarity, as masculine and feminine. The same power lies in all people and works through the meeting of the two. Neither is valued above the other. Sex is valued as a pleasure, as a symbol of life, and as a source of the energy used in magic and worship.
- Two worlds. There is an outer world and an inner one, called by various names: the spiritual world, the collective unconscious, the inner planes. Psychic experience and magic come from the meeting of the two, and neither should be neglected.
- No hierarchy. Witches recognise no authoritarian hierarchy. They honour those who teach, respect those who share their knowledge, and acknowledge those who take on the work of leadership.
- One way of life. Religion, magic and wisdom in living are united in a single way of seeing the world and of living in it, which is witchcraft.
- What makes a witch. Calling oneself a witch does not make one a witch, and neither do heredity, titles, degrees or initiations. A witch is one who seeks to master the forces within themselves, so as to live wisely and well, without harm to others and in harmony with nature.
- The growth of consciousness. Witches affirm life and its fulfilment, in a continuing growth of consciousness that gives meaning to the universe and to each person's place in it.
- Other religions. The only quarrel witches have with Christianity, or with any other religion, is with institutions that have claimed to be the only way, and have tried to deny freedom to others and to suppress their beliefs and practices.
- History. American witches are not threatened by debates about the history of the Craft, the origins of its terms or the legitimacy of its traditions. They are concerned with its present and its future.
- No Devil. Witches do not accept the idea of absolute evil, and do not worship Satan or the Devil as Christian tradition defines him. They do not seek power through the suffering of others, nor accept that one person's good must be bought with another's loss.
- Health. Witches seek within nature whatever contributes to health and well-being.
What they leave out
The Principles were written by people of many traditions, and they leave out whatever those people could not agree on, which tells us as much as what they include.
They do not name the Goddess and the God. They speak of a creative power working through polarity, which was a formula that a wide range of American witches could accept, and they leave each tradition to say who the gods are. They do not quote the Wiccan Rede, although the eighth and twelfth principles come very close to it. They say nothing about the circle, the tools or the shape of a rite. And they do not mention initiation except to say that it does not, by itself, make anyone a witch.
How we read them
We are a British coven of an initiatory tradition, and the Principles were written by and largely for Americans of every tradition and none. Even so, there is very little in them that we would not sign, and some of it we would put in larger type.
The sixth principle describes the Craft as we know it. There is no authority above the coven, and no one who can tell a High Priestess how to run her circle, as we say on the page about the coven. The twelfth answers the question we are asked most often by worried strangers, and answers it well.
The eighth needs a gloss from a Gardnerian. Initiation does make a person a Gardnerian, as the page on lineage explains, because the word describes a line received from another person. But it does not make anyone a good witch, and neither do degrees, and on that we agree entirely. We have known excellent witches who were never initiated and indifferent ones with three degrees.
The eleventh is the one we most admire. It was written in 1974, when most witches on both sides of the Atlantic still believed that the Craft had come down unbroken from the Stone Age, and twenty years before professional historians turned to the origins of Wicca itself. Its authors saw that a religion which depended on a particular story about its own past was at the mercy of the next historian, and that a religion which did not was not. That is very much our own position, and our High Priest has written about it in The Old Religion and the Honest Historian.
The Principles are not scripture, and the people who wrote them would have been the first to say so. But anyone who wants to know what witches believe could do a great deal worse than to read them, and then to read the page on the beliefs of Wicca, which is our own attempt at the same thing.