History

The Real History of Wicca and Witchcraft

The scent of fallen leaves drifts through my kitchen window this morning, mingling with coffee and the earthy smell of last night’s rain. I’m thinking about roots – not just the kind I pull from the garden beds. I mean the roots of what we do when we light our candles and speak our intentions into the dark.

Where we come from matters. Not because you need a pedigree to practice witchcraft – you don’t! – but because knowing the truth keeps you from building your practice on a foundation of fantasy. I’ve met too many practitioners who think they’re continuing an unbroken line stretching back to neolithic goddess worship, and the disappointment when they learn otherwise can shake them badly. Better to know the real story from the start. It’s messier than the myths, more human, and in my opinion, far more interesting.

Ancient Roots

Long before anyone called themselves a witch – before the word itself took on the weight it now carries – there were people who knew things. They knew which plants brought down a fever. They knew words to say over a difficult birth. They knew how to find water, when to plant, what the weather would do by watching the sky and the behavior of animals.

These were the cunning folk, the wise women, the village healers. They weren’t a separate religion or an organized practice. They were simply part of the fabric of community life, the way a good midwife or herbalist might be today. In England, they were called cunning folk or pellars. In Italy, benandanti. In Scandinavia, völvas or seiðkona. Every culture had them, called them different things, understood their work through different lenses.

Their magic – and yes, I’ll call it that – was practical. It involved prayers and charms, yes, but also observation, plant knowledge, basic psychology, and a good deal of common sense. They blessed fields and livestock. They made love charms and healing potions. They found lost objects and identified thieves. Most were Christian, or at least Christian enough for their neighbors. They saw no contradiction between faith and folk practice. The local priest might disapprove, but often he’d look the other way, especially when his own cow took sick.

This wasn’t witchcraft as we understand it now. There was no theology, no seasonal celebrations, no organization. Just useful knowledge passed down, evolving as it went, practical as bread.

The Burning Times

Now we come to the part that gets misunderstood most often, and I’ll tell you plainly: nearly everything you think you know about the witch trials is probably wrong.

The witch trials were real, and they were horrific. Between roughly 1450 and 1750, somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe and colonial America. That’s a conservative estimate. Each one of those deaths was a tragedy, a life cut short by fear and cruelty and the kind of mass hysteria that humans seem depressingly prone to.

But they weren’t burning nine million witches. They weren’t targeting an organized pagan religion, because no such religion existed. They weren’t exclusively killing women (though women were the majority of victims, especially in some regions – about 75-80% overall). And most of the people killed weren’t healers or midwives, though some certainly were.

The trials were about power, politics, property, and paranoia. They were about communities under stress finding scapegoats. They were about the particular theology of the time, which held that the Devil was real and active in the world, making pacts with humans to corrupt Christian society. Accusations often followed the fault lines of existing tensions – property disputes, family feuds, religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, the dislocations of economic change.

In some places, the trials barely happened. In others, they became frenzied campaigns. The Spanish Inquisition, contrary to its popular reputation, was actually skeptical of witchcraft accusations and executed relatively few people for it. Meanwhile, in parts of Germany and Switzerland, entire villages were decimated. The trials in Salem killed twenty people over a few terrible months. The trials in Bamberg, Germany, killed somewhere around 300 people over several years.

The people accused were often vulnerable – the elderly, the poor, the argumentative, the odd. But they were also sometimes prominent citizens, even clergy, caught up in the paranoia. The common thread was that someone believed they’d made a pact with the Devil, and in the climate of the times, that accusation could become a death sentence.

Witch Trial Myths

Let me be direct about some common myths, because they do real harm to how we understand both history and our own practice.

Myth: Nine million witches were killed. This number comes from poorly researched claims in the 1800s and was picked up by some feminist writers in the 1970s. Modern historians place the number between 40,000-60,000 across three centuries. That’s still 40,000-60,000 too many, but accuracy matters.

Myth: The trials targeted organized pagans or goddess worshippers. There’s no evidence of surviving organized pagan religions in this period. The accused were Christian, or Jewish, or occasionally Muslim in Spain. The charge was Devil worship, not old religion.

Myth: Midwives and healers were specifically targeted. Some were, certainly. But most victims weren’t midwives. The connection between midwifery and witch accusations has been overstated. Many midwives practiced throughout their lives without accusation.

Myth: It was a deliberate campaign to destroy women’s power. The trials did disproportionately affect women, and misogyny was absolutely a factor in how witchcraft was understood and who was vulnerable to accusation. But this wasn’t a coordinated effort to destroy women’s power. It was more chaotic, more local, more complicated than that.

Why does this matter? Because building a practice on historical fantasy makes it fragile. When you learn the truth, does your practice collapse? Mine is built on what I actually do, what actually works, what I’ve learned and passed down – not on romantic notions of an ancient sisterhood.

The Occult Revival

Between the witch trials and modern witchcraft, something happened. Actually, many things happened, but what matters for our story is this: starting in the late 1800s, educated Europeans became fascinated with magic again.

This wasn’t folk magic. This was something new – or something they thought was old, reconstructed with varying degrees of accuracy. The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, popularized ideas about ancient wisdom traditions and mystical knowledge. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, created elaborate ceremonial magic systems drawing on Kabbalah, tarot, astrology, and Egyptian symbolism. Spiritualism had people gathering in parlors trying to contact the dead.

This is when you start seeing the idea that witchcraft might be an ancient pagan survival, not just Devil worship. In 1899, Charles Leland published *Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches*, claiming it was the text of a surviving Italian witch cult. Scholars now think he was partially or entirely hoaxed by his source, but the book influenced everyone who came after. In 1921, Margaret Murray published *The Witch-Cult in Western Europe*, arguing that the people killed in the witch trials had actually been members of an organized pre-Christian fertility religion. Her work has been thoroughly debunked, but it was taken seriously at the time, and it gave people ideas.

The people involved in this revival were largely middle and upper class. They had time to read, travel, join societies. They mixed together bits of ceremonial magic, folk practices, newly translated Eastern texts, Romanticism’s love of the ancient and mysterious, and their own creativity. Some of it was scholarly, some of it was pure invention, and most of it was some blend of the two.

This is the soil Gerald Gardner was working in. Remember that.

Gerald Gardner & The Birth of Wicca

Gardner was a retired British civil servant with an interest in naturism (nudism), folk customs, and the occult. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he claimed to have been initiated into a surviving witch cult in the New Forest area of England, centered in Bricket Wood. He said they practiced an ancient pagan religion that had survived underground since pre-Christian times.

Most scholars now believe this wasn’t true, or at least not true in the way Gardner presented it. There may have been a group doing something – perhaps ceremonial magic, perhaps a creative ritual experiment. But the evidence for an ancient surviving tradition is essentially nonexistent. What Gardner gave us was something new, created by combining folk practices, ceremonial magic from the Golden Dawn, Margaret Murray’s theories, Aleister Crowley’s influence (they knew each other), and Gardner’s own inventions.

This became Wicca, though he initially called it “the craft” or “witchcraft.” The first Book of Shadows – the ritual text of Wicca – was largely Gardner’s work, drawing heavily on Crowley’s material and other sources. He created (or claimed to have received) a system of initiatory degrees, ritual tools, seasonal celebrations following the wheel of the year, and reverence for both a God and Goddess.

He also had some ideas that haven’t aged well. His insistence on ritual nudity was controversial even then, and in hindsight looks more like his personal preference than ancient practice. His original materials were more Golden Dawn than folk magic. And he was quite sure he needed to be the one to spread and control this religion, which created conflicts with his initiates.

But here’s what Gardner did give us: a framework. Seasonal celebrations that connect to the land’s rhythms. Reverence for deity as both masculine and feminine. Ritual that’s participatory, not passive. Magic as a practice open to ordinary people, not just ceremonial magicians with years of study. The idea that witchcraft could be a religion, with ethics and community and meaning, not just spellwork.

Gardner: Innovator or Appropriator?

I’ve spent forty years in this practice trying to sort out how I feel about Gerald Gardner, and I still haven’t entirely settled it.

On one hand, he gave us something real and valuable. Without Gardner, I don’t know that we’d have modern witchcraft as a living religious practice. He created a structure that worked, that has sustained communities for seventy years, that has evolved and grown and spread across the world. That’s not nothing.

On the other hand, he lied. Or at best, he told a story he wanted to be true and presented it as fact. He borrowed extensively from Crowley and others without always crediting them. He claimed ancient origins he couldn’t prove. He set himself up as the authority and gatekeeper. His insistence on nudity had more to do with his own interests than any historical practice.

And yet – is creating something new actually worse than pretending it’s old? Would Wicca have taken root if he’d said “I made this up from various sources”? Maybe the myth was necessary at the time.

I tend to think of Gardner like I think of a complicated ancestor. You can acknowledge what they gave you whilst also recognizing their flaws. You can use what works and set aside what doesn’t. You can be grateful for the foundation whilst building something different on it.

Modern Wicca has evolved far beyond what Gardner created. We’ve corrected some of his errors, adapted to new contexts, made it more inclusive, acknowledged the actual history. We’re still doing that work.

Gardner opened a door. It’s up to us what we build in the space beyond it.

Doreen Valiente & The Charge

If Gardner gave us the framework, Doreen Valiente gave us the poetry.

Valiente was initiated by Gardner in 1953 and quickly became one of his most important students. She was also, crucially, a far better writer than he was. When she looked at Gardner’s Book of Shadows, she recognized material lifted from Crowley, from Kipling, from various ceremonial magic sources. With Gardner’s permission, she rewrote much of it, creating something more original and more beautiful.

Her most famous contribution is the Charge of the Goddess – those words many Wiccans know by heart about “I am the beauty of the green earth and the white moon among the stars.” Gardner had a version, but it was clunky and borrowed. Valiente’s rewrite, completed in the late 1950s, became the central liturgical text of Wicca. It’s genuinely beautiful poetry that captures something essential about the tradition’s understanding of deity.

She also pushed back against Gardner’s need for control and his stranger ideas. When he wanted all publicity to go through him, she argued for decentralization. When his emphasis on nudity made people uncomfortable, she suggested alternatives. She eventually split from Gardner’s coven over these disagreements, continuing to practice and write but charting her own course.

Valiente spent the rest of her life writing, teaching, and defending the tradition she’d helped create whilst also being honest about its origins. Her books are clear-eyed about Gardner’s fabrications whilst still valuing what emerged from them. She understood something crucial: that a religion can be newly created and still be real and meaningful. That ancient origins aren’t what make a practice valid.

The Spread of Wicca

Wicca came to North America in the 1960s, brought by Raymond Buckland, who’d been initiated in Gardner’s tradition. Buckland founded the first American Gardnerian coven and spent years teaching, writing, and spreading the practice.

But something happened as Wicca crossed the Atlantic and moved through the decades. It began to change, to adapt, to diversify. This is what living traditions do.

Some changes were small adjustments for a new context. British seasonal celebrations don’t quite map onto North American climates – Imbolc in early February feels very different in Scotland than in Arizona. Some changes were about making the tradition more accessible, less dependent on finding an initiator.

Some changes were deeper theological or ethical shifts. Different understandings of deity emerged. Different ritual structures. Different relationships to the material Gardner had borrowed from ceremonial magic. The Faery tradition, brought to America by Victor Anderson, emphasized ecstatic experience and personal gnosis. Alex Sanders created Alexandrian Wicca in England, blending Gardnerian practice with more ceremonial magic.

By the 1970s, you had a proliferation of traditions, each putting their own spin on the basic framework. And you had practitioners who’d read Gardner or Valiente or others and decided to practice on their own, without initiation, creating their own version of the work.

This troubled some traditionalists. How could you be Wiccan without proper initiation? Without a lineage? Weren’t people just making it up?

Well, yes. But Gardner had also made it up. That wasn’t quite the trump card the traditionalists thought it was.

Feminist Witchcraft & Reclaiming

The 1970s and 80s brought something new: explicitly feminist witchcraft, created by and for women reclaiming power in a patriarchal world.

Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance, published in 1979, presented witchcraft as earth-based spirituality, feminist practice, and political activism woven together. The Reclaiming tradition she co-founded emphasized collective rather than hierarchical organization, political engagement, and accessibility. Z Budapest founded Dianic Wicca, which honored the Goddess alone and excluded men from ritual circles – controversial then and now, but coming from a place of real pain about male violence and female oppression.

This wave of feminist witchcraft was less concerned with Gardnerian lineages and more concerned with women’s power, connection to nature, and resistance to oppression. Some of it explicitly drew on the myth of the Burning Times as a women’s holocaust, which as I’ve said isn’t historically accurate – but the emotional truth behind it, the recognition of systematic violence against women, was and is real.

These practitioners asked: Why do we need male gods at all? Why do we need hierarchical degree systems? Why do we need to be initiated by someone else when women have been kept out of so many forms of power? Can’t we claim this for ourselves?

The answer, increasingly, was yes.

Not all of feminist witchcraft’s innovations have worn well. Some of the gender essentialism – the idea that women are inherently more peaceful, more connected to nature, more spiritual – was always more wishful thinking than reality. But the insistence that you could create your own relationship with the divine, that power structures weren’t necessary, that witchcraft could be political – that changed things permanently.

Eclectic & Solitary Practice

By the 1990s, something had shifted. Increasingly, people were practicing witchcraft outside of traditional covens, mixing and matching from different traditions, creating personalized practices.

This was partly necessity. Not everyone lives near a coven. Not everyone wants the politics and interpersonal complexity of group work. Not everyone resonates with a specific tradition’s rules and requirements.

But it was also about a growing understanding that you didn’t need anyone’s permission to practice witchcraft. You didn’t need an unbroken lineage or a degree system or a high priest/ess to tell you that you were doing it right. You could read, experiment, learn from multiple sources, and create something that worked for you.

Scott Cunningham’s books, especially Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner, gave people practical instructions for practicing alone. Silver RavenWolf’s books, whatever their other issues, made witchcraft accessible to teenagers. The internet began connecting solitary practitioners, sharing spells and rituals and experiences.

Traditional Wiccans sometimes looked at this with dismay. Where was the training? The standards? How could you just decide you were a witch without initiation? Wasn’t this appropriation of their tradition?

Maybe. But traditions don’t own practices. You can’t copyright a pentagram or a circle casting or celebrating the full moon. And plenty of eclectic practitioners were doing deep, sincere, effective work, just not within established structures.

These days, most witches are solitary and eclectic. That’s just the reality of modern practice.

Modern Witchcraft Today

The wind’s picking up, scattering leaves across the yard. The goats are complaining about something – probably nothing, they’re dramatic creatures. And I’m trying to wrap my head around TikTok witches, which makes me feel every one of my years.

Modern witchcraft is everywhere. Instagram altars, YouTube tutorials, TikTok spells, apps for tracking moon phases, online covens, Etsy shops selling ritual supplies. You can learn more about witchcraft in an afternoon of internet research than someone in the 1980s could have learned in a year of searching occult bookstores.

This accessibility is mostly wonderful. It means young people finding the craft early, building practices that sustain them. It means people in isolated locations connecting with community. It means traditions evolving rapidly, incorporating new ideas and perspectives.

But it also means misinformation spreads fast. It means practices get stripped of context. It means the loud voices aren’t always the knowledgeable ones. And it means the internet’s usual problems – performativity, appropriation, commodification – attach themselves to witchcraft too.

I watch young practitioners on social media and I feel complicated things. Pride at their confidence and creativity. Concern about the lack of depth in some corners, the way serious practice gets reduced to aesthetic. Frustration when I see blatant appropriation – white practitioners taking closed practices from Indigenous or African diasporic traditions and calling it “eclectic witchcraft.” Hope when I see thoughtful discussions about ethics, consent, cultural respect.

The internet has made witchcraft more accessible, but it’s also made it harder to sort signal from noise. Anyone can post a spell. Not everyone knows what they’re talking about.

What This Means for Your Practice

So what do you do with all this? How do you practice, knowing that Wicca is about seventy years old, that Gardner probably made most of it up, that there’s no unbroken line to ancient goddess worship, that your TikTok spell came from someone who’s been practicing for six months?

Here’s what I think, after four decades of this work:

You’re not continuing an ancient tradition unchanged since neolithic times. But you’re not making it all up from nothing either. You’re part of something that has roots – in folk magic, in ceremonial practice, in the occult revival, in Gardner’s creativity, in Valiente’s poetry, in feminist reclaiming of power, in generations of practitioners who’ve done the work before you.

The practices work not because they’re ancient but because they’re effective. Casting a circle creates psychological and energetic space for magic. Celebrating the seasons connects you to natural cycles. Working with deity provides a relationship that can hold and change you. Spell work focuses intention and will. These things work whether Gardner invented them in 1949 or they’ve been done for centuries.

Your practice doesn’t need to be historically ancient to be real. It needs to be alive – your actual relationship with the sacred, growing and changing as you do.

Be honest about what you know and don’t know. Don’t claim unbroken lineages that don’t exist. Don’t appropriate from living cultures that aren’t yours. Don’t mistake aesthetic for practice or performative social media posts for actual work.

But do the work. Cast your circles. Celebrate the seasons. Learn herbalism, divination, energy work. Build relationship with deity however you understand it. Find community or practice alone as suits you. Read widely, but verify your sources. Learn the history, including the uncomfortable parts.

You’re making a tradition, not inheriting one unchanged. That’s not a weakness. That’s what living traditions do.

You’re part of this story. Not the end of it – there’s no end, not in a living tradition – but part of the ongoing unfolding. What you do with witchcraft, how you practice it, what you create and pass on, that matters. That becomes part of the history too.

Know where you come from, but don’t be limited by it. The old practices were never as pure as myth claims, and the new practices are more rooted than critics say. Your work is to find what’s real, what’s effective, what calls to your soul and makes you more fully yourself.

You are not alone. You’re part of a messy, complicated, human lineage of people who’ve reached toward the sacred in darkness and in light.

Bide your time. Do the work. Let the practice change you. The rest will follow.

Witchcraft and Wicca: The Real History