The three words are used as though they meant the same thing. They do not, and most misunderstandings about our religion begin with the muddle between them.
The short version is this. Witchcraft is a practice. Wicca is a religion that includes that practice. Paganism is the wide family of religions to which Wicca belongs. A person can be a witch without being a Wiccan, and a pagan without being either. A Wiccan, in the traditional view, is all three. It is worth being exact about which is meant.
Witchcraft
Witchcraft, in its broadest sense, is the working of magic: the attempt to bring about change by means that are not ordinary cause and effect. In that sense it is found in nearly every society that has ever been studied, and it belongs to no one religion.
In European history the word has a darker meaning. From the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, a witch was a person accused of doing harm by magic, usually with the supposed help of the Devil. Historians now estimate that between forty and sixty thousand people were put to death as witches across Europe in that period. In England, where the penalty was hanging and not burning, the figure was probably fewer than five hundred. Almost none of those people would have called themselves witches. The men and women who really did practise folk magic in English villages, the charmers and cunning folk, were a different group, and they were more often consulted against witchcraft than accused of it.
Today the word has been reclaimed. There are many modern witches who are not Wiccan: people who practise folk magic, people who follow one of the forms of traditional witchcraft that arose alongside Wicca in the 1950s and 1960s, and a growing number who simply use the word for a private practice of their own devising. Some of them are religious and some are not.
Wicca
Wicca is a particular religion of witchcraft. It has gods, a ritual year, rites of passage, an ethic and, in its traditional form, a priesthood entered by initiation. It appeared in England in the middle of the twentieth century and is described throughout this site, beginning with What Is Wicca?
The word is used in two ways, and the difference causes a good deal of confusion.
- In the narrow sense, Wicca means the initiatory traditions that descend from Gerald Gardner's covens: chiefly the Gardnerian and the Alexandrian. A Wiccan in this sense is someone who has been initiated into one of those lines. This is how the word is generally used among initiates in Britain.
- In the wide sense, Wicca means any practice modelled on those traditions as they have been described in books: the Goddess and the God, the circle, the eight Sabbats, the Rede. A Wiccan in this sense may be self-taught and may never have met another witch. This is how the word is used in most bookshops and by most people who apply it to themselves.
Neither usage is wrong. We use the wide sense on this site when we write about Wicca in general, and we say Gardnerian when we mean our own tradition in particular.
Paganism
Paganism is the umbrella. Modern pagans are people who follow a religion inspired by the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the lands around it, or by reverence for nature, or both. Wicca is the largest and best known of the modern pagan religions, but it is one among several. Druidry looks to the Celtic past and has been an organised movement in Britain since the eighteenth century. Heathenry revives the religion of the Germanic and Norse peoples. There are reconstructions of Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Baltic religion, a broad current of Goddess spirituality, and a great many people who are simply pagan without further label.
These religions have different gods, different rites and sometimes very different ethics. What they share is mostly a matter of outlook: a sense that the world is alive and holy, a liking for many gods over one, and a calendar tied to the seasons. Most of them now keep some form of the eightfold Wheel of the Year, which took shape in the Craft and in modern Druidry around 1960.
The three compared
| Word | What it names | How it relates to the others |
|---|---|---|
| Witchcraft | A practice: the working of magic | Part of Wicca, but also found outside it and outside religion altogether |
| Wicca | A religion: gods, festivals, rites and an ethic, with witchcraft at its heart | Every Wiccan is a pagan, and in the traditional view every Wiccan is a witch |
| Paganism | A family of religions | Includes Wicca, Druidry, Heathenry and others. Most pagans are not witches |
So are Wiccans witches?
In the traditional understanding, yes. Gerald Gardner did not think of himself as founding a religion called Wicca. He believed he had been admitted to a coven of witches, and what he described in his books was witchcraft. Initiation into a Gardnerian coven makes a person, in the words of the rite, a priestess or priest and a witch. We use the word without embarrassment.
Some people who practise Wicca in the wide sense prefer not to call themselves witches, and some witches are at pains to say that they are not Wiccan. Both are entitled to their own names.
The words that initiates use
Among ourselves, British initiates seldom say Wicca at all. The older and commoner terms are these.
- The Craft
- The everyday name for the whole thing, religion and practice together. It is sometimes expanded to the Craft of the Wise, a phrase that rests on an old and mistaken belief that the word witch is related to the word wise. The affection for the phrase has outlived the etymology.
- The Wica
- Gerald Gardner's name for the people of the Craft, spelled with one c. It is still used among Gardnerians as a collective noun for initiates.
- The Old Religion
- A name from the days when the Craft was believed to be a direct survival of ancient paganism. It is used now with a certain fondness and an awareness of the history.
- Initiatory Wicca
- The usual British term for the Gardnerian and Alexandrian traditions together. In North America the same family is generally called British Traditional Wicca, a phrase seldom heard in Britain itself.
All of these and many more are defined in the glossary.