[The Pomegranate 12.

2 (2010) 185-207] ISSN 1528-0268 (Print)

doi: 10.1558/pome.v12i2.184 ISSN 1743-1735 (Online)

The Meaning of Wicca: A Study in Etymology, History,

and Pagan Politics

Ethan Doyle White

ethan-doyle-white@hotmail.co.uk

Abstract

This essay provides the first comprehensive examination of how the term
Wiccaused in reference to the modern religion of Pagan Witchcraft
has been utilised throughout the faiths history. Examining its anteced-
ents, including the Old English wicca and the early Gardnerian Wica,
the author looks at the many definitions that the term has seen over the
last seventy years, and comes to conclusions that provide a new interpre-
tation of not only how the term has been used in the Pagan community
of the past and the present, but also how it can most effectively be used
in the future.

According to the online Oxford Dictionary, the word Wicca refers to

the religious cult of modern witchcraft, especially an initiatory tradi-
tion founded in England in the mid 20th century and claiming its origins
in pre-Christian pagan religions. A similar definition is offered by Rose-
mary Ellen Guiley in her encyclopaedia of witchcraft when she states that
Wicca is the alternate, and sometimes preferred, name for the religion
of contemporary Witchcraft.1 Whilst these are the general definitions
of the term that I suspect would likely be agreed upon by the majority
of Pagans, occultists, and indeed scholars of new religious movements
around the world today, from both a historical and a contemporary per-
spective, they are massive oversimplifications of what is in fact an area
of conjecture and fierce debate.
The Pagan Witchcraft movementand I here use Witchcraft, capital-
ized, to denote the modern religious phenomenonis today the largest
and most influential form of contemporary Paganism, with what is likely
hundreds of thousands of followers around the world. As with any reli-
gion, there has been a great deal of disagreement and infighting over a
wide range of issues within its ranks, and this is perhaps most evident

1. Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft & Wicca (third
edition), (New York: Checkmark Books, 2008), 371.

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186 The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010)

regarding the issue of how the term Wicca, along with related terms
such as Wica and the Wicca, can and should be used. In this study, I
plan to examine the origins and etymology of the word, and the histori-
cal context in which it developed, in order to better understand how it
has been used and by whom since the 1950s.
Despite the large amount of work that has been undertaken by a
number of academics and independent researchers into the history of the
Pagan Witchcraft movement, no full examination of the development of
the term Wicca has ever before been published. Nonetheless, two pre-
liminary studies of the subject have already been made: the first of these
was an examination of the usage of the term Wicca within the United
States by Pagan scholar Chas S. Clifton, which was published in his 2006
book Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America.2 The
second was made by Melissa Seims, a British Gardnerian who published
her findings in a 2008 article entitled Wica or Wicca? Politics and the
Power of Words. In this article, first published in one of Britains best
known Craft magazines, The Cauldron, and later made available through
her personal website, she identified the usage of the word Wica (spelt
with one c and distinct from the contemporary word Wicca) within
early Gardnerianism and also explored the use of the word Wiccen by
another early Pagan Witch, Charles Cardell.3 Whilst Clifton and Seimss
works were pioneering, I take issue with some of their assumptions and
conclusions, and in this article I attempt to go beyond such preliminary
explorations of the subject by examining the evolution and development
of the term throughout the twentieth century.

The Anglo-Saxon Wicca

Before I examine the origins of the word Wicca and the context in
which it emerged in twentieth-century England, I believe it is necessary
to turn back the clock ten centuries, to the Early Mediaeval period, when
a word spelled wicca was utilized by the Anglo-Saxons, the speakers
of Old English. Such a word, which was actually pronounced witch-a,
referred to practitioners of sorcery, whilst their practices were them-
selves known as wiccecraeft or wiccedom,both of which would be
the equivalents of the modern words witchcraft or witchery.4 This
Anglo-Saxon sorcery was not a religion in itself, but a system of folk

2. Chas S. Clifton, Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America
(Lanham, Maryland: AltaMira Press, 2006.), 88-91.
3. Melissa Seims, Wica or Wicca? Politics and the Power of Words, The Cauldron
129, August 2008, http://www.thewica.co.uk/wica_or_wicca.htm.
4. Bill Griffiths, Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic (Hockwold-cum-Wilton, Norfolk:
Anglo-Saxon Books, 1996), 95.

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 Doyle White The Meaning of Wicca 187

magical charms and spells that had been used by both Pagans and Chris-
tians, some of which have survived in written records for us today.
What such evidence therefore makes clear is that the Old English
term wicca and the Modern English term Wiccaseparated by case
distinction, by pronunciation, and by a millennium in between their
usageare fundamentally and indisputably two distinct words with
very different meanings. Nonetheless, this does not rule out the possibil-
ity, and indeed the likelihood, that the modern term Wicca was influ-
enced, or even based upon, the Early Mediaeval wicca. The fact that
both related to forms of magical praxes, albeit ones that were radically
different to one another, makes it seem likely that the modern term was
heavily influenced by its historical counterpart. It comes as little surprise
that modern Pagan Witches would choose to adopt a historical term
such as wicca, for like almost all contemporary Pagan faiths, theirs
is one that draws heavily (in terms of iconography and inspiration, if
not actual belief and praxes), from the historical polytheistic peoples of
history. Gerald Gardner and other early Pagan Witches firmly associated
their Craft with the ancient British Pagans, believing there to be a direct
connection between the two via the Witch Cult, and by re-adopting the
term wicca in some form, they would have been cementing such a con-
nection, at least in their own eyes.

Gerald Gardner and the Wica

Turning our attention to Britain in the first half of the twentieth century,
we see the religion of Pagan Witchcraft beginning to emerge. From the
1930s through to the 1960s, there is evidence of a variety of different occult
groups popping up around England, all describing themselves, or being
described by others, as Witches, and following a form of magical Pagan
religion. It was the Father of Wicca, Gerald Gardner, who provided
the earliest account of such a group, making the claim (during the 1950s)
that in the year 1939 he had been initiated into the New Forest coven.
Although the definitive existence of this group has never been proved
outright, the researcher Philip Heselton has put forward a compelling
yet circumstantial case for its existence,5 and I am inclined to believe that
it did exist in some form, although did not probably predate the 1930s.
During the following decades, further covens apparently emerged in
other parts of the country, including Cheshire, Cumbria, Norfolk, Slough,
and the South Downs, all of which supposedly had origins independent
from those of the New Forest coven or the Gardnerian tradition that it

5. Philip Heselton, Wiccan Roots: Gerald Gardner and the Modern Witchcraft Revival
(Chieveley, Berkshire: Capall Bann, 2000).

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subsequently spawned, providing evidence for what could be termed a

multiple origins theory for Pagan Witchcraft.
Contrary to a claim that is often used in the Pagan and occult commu-
nities today, Gerald Gardner, the founder of Gardnerian Witchcraft and
the public face of the movement during the late 1950s and early1960s,
did not refer to his tradition of the Craft as Wicca, and there is in fact
no recorded instance of him ever using the word. Instead, he referred to
his faith as the Craft of the Wise, witchcraft, and the witch cult,
the latter of which was likely taken from the title of Egyptologist Marga-
ret Murrays seminal proto-Wiccan text The Witch-Cult in Western Europe
(1921). Alongside these names for the Pagan Craft as a faith, there is
ample evidence that Gardner referred to its adherents in a plural sense
as the Wica (note the single c), stating in the tenth chapter of his book
Witchcraft Today (1954) that

They are the people who call themselves the Wica, the wise people, who
practise the age-old rites.6

Similarly, in Gerald Gardner: Witch (1960), the biography written by

Gardners friend, the Sufi mystic Idries Shah, the term Wica is also
widely used in reference to the Pagan Witches as a collective entity, and
from this evidence it seems clear that it was this definition that Gardner
stuck to. Nonetheless, there is a singular piece of evidence implying that
Gardner also referred to individual Pagan Witches themselves as each
being a Wica,with Arnold Field, a reporter from the Manx newspa-
per The Daily Dispatch, stating that upon meeting Gardner in 1954, the
elderly Witch explained there are man and woman witches. Each is
called a wica.7 The reporter was not actually directly quoting Gardner
here, and it is perfectly possible that he simply misunderstood what
Gardner was telling him; he had, after all, also misspelled the word
Wica by not capitalizing it.
It is evident that Gardner used the term Wica with a very specific
spelling to refer to the members of the Pagan Witchcraft religion (and
not just his own tradition) as a group, and perhaps also individually,
and believed that the word had been used by the faiths members since
the Early Mediaeval period (in his 1959 book The Meaning of Witch-
craft he stated that It is a curious fact that when the [Pagan] witches
became English-speaking they adopted their Saxon name Wica.)8

6. Gerald Gardner, Witchcraft Today (London: Rider, 1954), 102.

7. Arnold Field, Yes I Am A Witch,The Daily Dispatch (Isle of Man), 5 August
1954.
8. Gerald Gardner, The Meaning of Witchcraft (London: Aquarian, 1971 [1959]), 96.

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This quote implies that he must have therefore associated his Wica
with the Old English wicca,and he certainly appeared to believe,
albeit incorrectly, that the Craft religion dated back to at least this
period. From his own personal accounts, it seems that he got this term
Wica from the New Forest coven who had initiated him in Septem-
ber 1939. For example, in The Meaning of Witchcraft, he recounted that:

I was half-initiated before the word Wica which they used hit me like a
thunderbolt, and I knew where I was, and that the Old Religion still existed.9

In Gerald Gardner: Witch, he offered a similar account of his initiation,

remarking that

It was halfway through when the word Wica was first mentioned: and I
then knew that that which I had thought burnt out hundreds of years ago
still survived.10

The fact that Gardner chose to spell this as Wica,using a single c,

should not be taken to mean that the coven necessarily spelt it the same
way (that is if they ever wrote it down at all, or that it even existed).
From his account, it seems that he had heard rather than read the word
in the midst of his initiatory rite, and suffering from a poor grasp of
spelling, punctuation, and grammar, something caused by the fact that
he was self-educated and possibly also influenced by dyslexia; he would
quite likely have simply spelt it phonetically as Wica. The possibil-
ity must therefore be noted that the New Forest coven could actually
have used the spelling wicca, assimilated from reading about histori-
cal witchcraft and magic (Gardner stated that they had carefully read
many books on the subject of the occult),11 although in what context we
cannot be sure. Like almost everything about this enigmatic coven, we
can only speculate based upon Gardners own writings, and these do
not give us much to go on.
The term Wica was subsequently adopted by many of the early
Gardnerians who were initiated into his tradition, and who themselves
left further written evidence of it. In 1963, Arnold Crowther, who was
the high priest of a coven in Sheffield, sent a letter to Gardner in which
he referred, presumably humorously, to The Wica Detective Agency.12
He also referred to Pagan Witchcraft as the Craft of the Wica in his
1965 book The Witches Speak, co-written with his wife, the high priestess

9. Gardner, Meaning of Witchcraft, 11

10. Jack Bracelin, Gerald Gardner: Witch (London: Octagon Press, 1960), 165.
11. Bracelin, Gerald Gardner: Witch, 164-65.
12. Letter from Arnold Crowther to Gardner. Owned by Richard and Tamara
James of the Wiccan Church of Canada. Cited in Seims, Wica or Wicca?.

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190 The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010)

Patricia Crowther.13 Similar uses can also be seen in the writings of other
early Gardnerians like Raymond Buckland, Monique and Scotty Wilson,
and in the oral use of it by Charles Clark.14 What is clearly illustrated by
such evidence is that despite any claims to the contrary made by current
Pagans, there is no evidence that the early Gardnerians made use of the
term Wicca to refer to either their tradition or to Pagan Witchcraft in
general, and that instead they used Wica to refer to the community of
Pagan Witches.

Charles Cardell and the Wiccens

So if it was not Gerald Gardner or the early Gardnerians who developed
the term Wicca to refer to the faith, then who was it? Gardnerian ini-
tiate and researcher Melissa Seims believed that the man responsible
may well have been one of Gardners rivals in the Pagan Witchcraft
movement of the 1950s, a psychologist and stage conjuror known as
Charles Cardell. According to press reports, Cardell controlled his own
coven from his estate in the village of Charlwood, Surrey, and also ran
a company called Dumblecott Magick Productions, through which he
sold potions as well as his own newsletter. He was active in the British
esoteric movement, being involved with Spiritualism as well as Pagan
Witchcraft, and was in contact with Gerald Gardner until they had a
falling out in 1958, after which Cardell set about to thoroughly discredit
him and his tradition, privately publishing much of the then-secret Gard-
nerian Book of Shadows following Gardners death in 1964.
In 1958, Charles Cardell wrote an article for Light magazine, the pub-
lished journal of the College of Psychic Science, which he titled The Craft
of the Wiccens, and in which he invited all Wiccens, thereby refer-
ring to Pagan Witches, to get in contact with him.15 It therefore appears
that Cardell was responsible for the propagation, and quite possibly
the invention, of the term Wiccen (as opposed to the now more com-
monly used, but presumably almost phonetically identical, Wiccan)
in reference to the followers of the Pagan Witchcraft movement as a
whole, but whether he referred to the Pagan Craft itself as Wicca is
another matter. Seims believed that this was a likelihood because of a
piece of evidence that she unearthed in the archives of the Museum of
Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall. In a letter dated 23 February 1960,

13. Arnold Crowther and Patricia Crowther, The Witches Speak, (Douglas, Isle of
Man: Athol Publications, 1965), 39.
14. Raymond Buckland, Witchcraftthe Religion, (Brentwood, New York: The
Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick, 1966), 20; Seims, Wica or Wicca?.
15. Aidan A. Kelly, Inventing Witchcraft: A Case Study in the Creation of a New Reli-
gion, (Loughborough, Leicestershire: Thoth Publications, 2007), 87.

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Margaret Bruce, the owner of a mail-order business dealing in occult

goods, consoled Gardner following Cardells increasingly hostile actions
against him and included a short poem summarising the situation:

We feel it is tragick
That those who lack Magick.
Should start a vendetta
With those who know betta
We who practice the Art
Have no wish to take part
Seems a pity the Wicca
Dont realise this Quicca.16

Seims believed that this usage of Wicca was explicitly in reference to

the Cardellian tradition, and that it therefore indicated that this spell-
ing, along with Wiccen, was used by Cardell.17 I would, however,
point out that this is not the only explanation, and it could be that Bruce
was instead referring to the Wicca as a community of Pagan Witches
(it would therefore be a misspelling of Gardners the Wica), and in this
manner she would actually not be commenting solely on the bad behav-
iour of the Cardellians but on how the various traditions of Pagan Witch-
craft were fighting amongst one another, something that she clearly
disapproved of. Either way, the fact that this spelling only appears in
a private letter and not in any published works of the period indicates
that such terminology was apparently not widespread in the Craft at
the time.
Nonetheless, Seims also identified another piece of evidence that
potentially indicated the Cardellian usage of Wicca: this was an adver-
tisement published in Fate magazine in 1962, in which a Cardiff-based
tradition known as WiccaDianic and Aradian was mentioned.
Seims connected this to the Cardells for the reason that Mary Cardell
was originally from Wales and Diana is the main Goddess mentioned
in the Atho material which appears to have originated with Cardell.18 I
would, however, challenge this as being too vague a connection between
the Cardells and this advertisement, noting that many of the early Pagan
Witchcraft groups would have naturally adopted the names Diana and
Aradia for their deities, these being the two witch goddesses in Charles
Lelands alleged account of a Tuscan witchcraft religion, Aradia, or the
Gospel of the Witches (1899). This advertisement is, however, interesting in

16. Letter from Margaret Bruce to Gardner. Held in the Museum of Witchcraft,
Boscastle. Cited in Seims, Wica or Wicca?.
17. Seims, Wica or Wicca?.
18. Seims, Wica or Wicca?.

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that it appears to be the earliest known published reference to Wicca in

the context of the Pagan Witchcraft religion, at least that which is known
to the author.
It is of note on a sideline here that Robert Cochrane, another of Gard-
ners rivals who propagated a form of religious Witchcraft during the
early sixties (whether it was Pagan or Luciferian-Gnostic in nature is
a matter of disagreement amongst his current followers), referred to
the illusionary world of Ye Olde English Wiccen in a 1964 article of
his published in Pentagram, the newsletter of the Witchcraft Research
Association.19 It appears here, however, that Cochrane was not making
any claim to the term Wiccen for his own followers but was merely
ridiculing those Witches, namely the Gardnerians but also perhaps the
Cardellians, who used mock-archaic language in their rituals. He cer-
tainly knew of Cardell and disliked him and his tradition, and it may be
for this reason that he was mockingly using their term.20
It is of further note that the following year, when the journalist
Justine Glass published Witchcraft, The Sixth Senseand Us, she made
no mention of the Craft being referred to as Wicca. She had been aided
in her research for the work by the likes of Cochrane, Doreen Valiente,
and Patricia Crowther, and surely if any of them had been aware of it,
then it would most likely have been included in Glasss text. She had,
howeveron the very first page no lessmade note of the fact that the
word witch had originated in the Anglo-Saxon wicca.21 Glass was
not the only writer on the subject of Pagan Witchcraft to highlight this.
Gardner, in The Meaning of Witchcraft, mentioned the fact a total of five
times, something that Melissa Seims believed was likely to be down to
the influence of his high priestess Doreen Valiente, who aided him in the
writing of the work, and who herself was very interested in the etymol-
ogy of the word.22 Valiente also made note of it on the very first page
of her Where Witchcraft Lives (1962), however, this book never achieved
widespread distribution.23 This is of potential importance because it dis-
plays that the Old English wicca was a word that was already being
used in most of the same published sources that discussed contempo-
rary Pagan Witchcraft. It seems likely that many Witches would have had

19. Robert Cochrane, The Craft Today, Pentagram 2, November 1964.

20. Robert Cochrane, The Robert Cochrane Letters: An Insight into Modern Traditional
Witchcraft, (Milverton, Somerset: Capall Bann, 2002), 127.
21. Justine Glass, Witchcraft, the Sixth Senseand Us (London: Neville Spearman,
1965).
22. Seims, Wica or Wicca?.
23. Doreen Valiente, Where Witchcraft Lives, (The Centre for Pagan Studies, 2010
[1962]), 1.

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 Doyle White The Meaning of Wicca 193

access to these books, which at the time were three of only four works
to be published on the subject, and it would not have been a large step
for some of them to adapt the Old English wicca,which they believed
to be an ancient word for witch, into the Modern English Wicca, a
term for their newly burgeoning faith.

Wicca, John Score, Gavin Frost, and the Alexandrians

In the penultimate issue of the Pentagram newsletter, published in
December 1965, a small column was included that examined Hallow-
een and its connection to the Craft. Whilst the writers name was not
included, it was presumably produced by Gerard Noel, Doreen Valiente,
or one of the other figures involved in the production of the paper. What
is important about this particular piece was that within it, the Craft of
the Wiccan was mentioned, apparently referring to the entire Pagan
Witchcraft religion, with this providing another early printed example of
the term.24 Following the collapse of Pentagram, a group of British Gard-
nerians began publication of a newsletter devoted to the Pagan Craft
in July 1968, which they titled The Wiccan. Edited by the Dorset-based
high priest John Score, who had been initiated only the previous year
by Madge Worthington, it provides us with good evidence that by this
period in time, the term Wiccan was being used amongst the Gard-
nerian community, and that Wicca was quite presumably being used
as well. Indeed, one Welshman, Gavin Frost, apparently came upon it
around this time, for when he and his wife, Yvonne, moved to the United
States soon after, they founded a teaching group known as the Church
of Wicca in 1968, through which they propagated their own unusually
monotheistic tradition.25 The term Wicca had arrived.
Around the same time, Wicca was also certainly being used by adher-
ents of a new tradition that had only just emerged in Britain, Alexandri-
anism, a Craft variant developed by the third degree Gardnerian initiate
Alex Sanders, which he attempted to pass off as a hereditary form of
Pagan Witchcraft. Melissa Seims noted that the word Wicca was used
in King of the Witches: The World of Alex Sanders (1969), an overly positive
biography written of Sanders by the journalist June Johns. Despite this,
the only actual reference to Wicca found in the book is in the glossary,
where it is described as an ancient word for witchcraft. It is clear then
that here Johns is simply referring to the Old English word wicca,

24. Halloween, Pentagram 5, December 1965, 19.

25. Guiley, Encyclopedia, 61.

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194 The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010)

which due to its inclusion in a glossary has been capitalized.26

Following on from the success of King of the Witches, the publisher
Peter Davies was interested in releasing another book on the subject of
the Craft, and so Sanders approached another sympathetic journalist,
Stewart Farrar, to write a work that would examine the particular beliefs
and practices of the Alexandrian tradition. Farrar soon became an Alex-
andrian initiate and used what he had learned from this in the writing
of What Witches Do: A Modern Coven Revealed, published in 1971. In this
work, Farrar clearly used the term Wicca to refer to Pagan Witchcraft
in its totality, referring to it as the witches name for their Craft, thereby
implying that at this period Alex Sanders and his coven, which was the
only group that Farrar was actually associated with, referred to their
faith as Wicca. Following on from this, Farrar also stated that Wicca is
divided, sometimes bitterly, into more than one school of thought, and
that as such there were four sects: Hereditary, Traditional, Gardnerian
and Alexandrian.27 This work, which was one of the earliest published
texts to deal with the subject of modern Pagan Witchcraft, is therefore
probably the earliest published example of the term Wicca being used
in a book at all, and here it is clearly being used in reference to the Pagan
Witchcraft religion as a whole.
Further evidence of how Wicca was utilized amongst the early
Alexandrians can be found in the various lectures that Sanders distrib-
uted amongst his initiates circa 1970, and which were collected together
and published as The Alex Sanders Lectures in 1984. In the first of these
lectures, entitled The Wicca and the Horned God, Sanders, or at least
one of his disciples, refers incorrectly to Wicca as being the Anglo-
Saxon word for the craft of the Wise, and also refers to the Wicca as
the name of the Pagan Witchcraft religion, presumably in its entirety. In
this sense it was likely a spelling confusion based upon the Gardnerian
use of the Wica (which Sanders, being a Gardnerian third-degree ini-
tiate, would have almost certainly encountered) with wicca, the Old
English word pertaining to witchcraft. However, in other parts of the lec-
tures, the term Wicca is used without the appendage of the to refer
to the religion, thereby fitting with its contemporary usage by Farrar.28
There is so much literature regarding Pagan Witchcraft, both pub-
lished and unpublished, that dates from the 1960s and 1970s, that it
would be a near-impossible task to collate and study it all to discover

26. June Johns, King of the Witches: The World of Alex Sanders, (London: Peter Davies,
1969).
27. Stewart Farrar, What Witches Do: A Modern Coven Revealed, (London: Peter
Davies, 1971), 04-06.
28. Alex Sanders, The Alex Sanders Lectures. (New York: Magickal Childe Publish-
ing, 1984).

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 Doyle White The Meaning of Wicca 195

the oldest known written use of the word Wicca in reference to the
modern Pagan religion. Despite this, it can be said for certain that at
least by the latter part of the 1960s and early part of the 1970s, terms like
Wiccan, Wicca, and the Wicca were being used in reference to the
Pagan Witchcraft religion as a whole amongst the Gardnerians, Frosts,
and the early Alexandrians, and that they were gradually becoming
more publicly identifiable. This trend for referring to the Pagan Witch-
craft religion as Wicca had obvious advantages: the term witchcraft
had always had negative connotations in the Western imagination, being
associated with the malevolent usage of magic and Satanic rites. As a
result of this, many of the early Pagan Witches had persecution by those
who believed them to be evil and dangerous individuals, suffering from
broken windows, arson attacks, or having their children taken into social
care. By adopting Wicca over Witchcraft as the name of their faith,
they automatically removed some (although by no means all) of the
social stigma that would otherwise have been associated with them.

Wicca and the Rise of Solitary Pagan Witchcraft

One of the most significant trends to occur in the Craft during the 1970s
was the publication of the first books that taught the reader how to set
themselves up as a Pagan Witch and begin performing the accompa-
nying rites, either within their own coven or as a solitary practitioner.
The earliest of these, Mastering Witchcraft: A Practical Guide for Witches,
Warlocks & Covens (1970), had been written by Paul Huson, an English-
man living in the United States who had developed his own version of
the Craft based largely upon what he had read in books.29 In Mastering
Witchcraft, no mention was made of either the terms Wica or Wicca,
and this could be taken as evidence that by this time the term Wicca
was not well enough known to be made use of or simply that Huson
himself did not know of it.30
One of the next books to be published in this genre, written by the
Gardnerian high priest Raymond Buckland, who like Huson was an
Englishman living in the United States, was The Tree: The Complete Book
of Saxon Witchcraft (1974), in which he publicized his newly developed
self-initiatory tradition of Seax-Wica, which took much of its iconog-
raphy from Anglo-Saxon Paganism. In The Tree, Buckland used the
Gardnerian spelling of Wica to refer to the name of the tradition (as
opposed to using it in reference to its followers as Gardner had done),

29. Paul Kane, Mastering Witchcraft, The Cauldron 135, February 2010; personal
communication with Paul Huson.
30. Paul Huson, Mastering Witchcraft: A Practical Guide for Witches, Warlocks &
Covens (New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1970).

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but at the same time referred to the texts within the Gardnerian Book
of Shadows as Wiccan liturgy and declared that the Wicca (Witch-
craft) is a Mystery Religion.31 This usage of the Wicca is identical to
that which Alex Sanders had been using in his lectures just a few years
previously in England, and is further evidence of the use of such a term
amongst both Alexandrians and Gardnerians.
The late 1960s and 1970s also saw the public emergence of a number
of new Pagan Witchcraft traditions in the United States such as the 1734
Craft, the Feri tradition, and The New Reformed Orthodox Order of the
Golden Dawn. Perhaps the most notable new tradition, however, was
Dianic Witchcraft, a feminist, Goddess-orientated Craft variant devel-
oped by Zsuzsanna Budapest, a Hungarian immigrant who based it
upon prior published books on Pagan Witchcraft along with her own
personal politics. After founding a Dianic coven in Los Angeles, she
went on to write her own work, The Holy Book of Womens Mysteries
(1979), in which she included several of her earlier articles that had been
published in various magazines. Although in most of these she referred
to her religious path as witchcraft, in one of them, entitled Herstory
and dating from February 1974, she wrote that Thousands of wicca
covens exist today, indicating that she either knew of the term Wicca
(but here had simply failed to capitalize it), or, perhaps less likely in this
context, was referring to the original Anglo-Saxon word.32 Either way,
it is clear that she chose to rarely make use of the term Wicca, prefer-
ring to reclaim witchcraft from its negative connotations for the Pagan
feminist cause, just as an organization named WITCHthe Womens
International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, had done in the 1960s. This
trend amongst early feminist Goddess-orientated Witches to avoid the
term Wicca was continued by Starhawk, the founder of the Reclaim-
ing tradition, who wrote the influential book The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth
of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979). In this work, she makes
no mention of Wicca, perhaps because she was simply not aware of it,
instead referring to her faith as Witchcraft.33 In later decades, however,
she appears to have changed her position on this, authoring a book enti-
tled The Beginners Guide to Wicca (2003).
Whilst the Alexandrians and others had begun using Wicca in
reference to the Pagan Witchcraft religion as a whole, it appears that

31. Raymond Buckland, The Tree: The Complete Book of Saxon Witchcraft (York Beach,
Maine: Wesier, 1974), 2.
32. Zsuzsanna Budapest, The Holy Book of Womens Mysteries Volume I (revised
edition), (Privately published, 1986 [1979]), 18.
33. Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999 [1979]).

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 Doyle White The Meaning of Wicca 197

during the 1970s and 1980s, as a term it had become increasingly associ-
ated purely with Gardnerianism-Alexandrianism, the British traditions
which emphasised an initiatory lineage and held to highly similar litur-
gies within their respective Books of Shadows. In North America, these
began to be referred to as British Traditional Wicca in order to sepa-
rate them from both American-based initiatory traditions like Feri and
the increasing numbers of solitary practitioners. In turn, it appears that
many Gardnerians and Alexandrians actually began to see Wicca as a
term that applied purely to themselves, and not to other forms of Pagan
Witchcraft, whilst some non-Gardnerian-Alexandrians began refus-
ing to consider themselves to be classified as Wiccan, quite probably
because of a wish to disassociate themselves from the Craft of Gardner
or Sanders.34 The idea that Wicca should apply purely to Gardnerian-
ism and to a lesser extent Alexandrianism (which at the time had a far
smaller presence in North America) had implications for the politics of
the Pagan community. Many of the early Gardnerians in America were
accused of a snobbish attitude towards other Pagan Witches, denigrat-
ing non-Gardnerians and setting up their own system of paperwork to
ensure that only those who had a correct initiatory lineage could work
within a Gardnerian coven.35 By then adopting the idea that only they
could be considered Wiccan, these Gardnerians would have been
further securing what they perceived as their own unique and special
position within the Pagan community.
Meanwhile, 1981 saw the publication of Wicca: The Ancient Way,
the first book to contain the word Wicca actually within the title.
Written by three individuals going under the pseudonyms of Janus-
Mithras, Nuit-Hilaria, and Mer-Amun, the book was published by
the Canadian company Isis Urania and referred to Wicca as an ini-
tiatory path (thereby inferring that it referred purely to Gardnerian-
ism and its associated traditions) whilst at the same time referred to the
Craft which it was describing as Traditional Witchcraft, something
that was in firm contrast to later usage of that particular term, which
has been typically reserved for explicitly non-Gardnerian groups.36

Later in the decade, other books would be published containing Wicca

in their titles, this time purporting a form of the Craft which anyone

34. Graham Harvey, Listening People, Speaking Earth: Contemporary Paganism

(London: C. Hurst & Co, 2007), 35.
35. Frederic Lamond, Fifty Years of Wicca (Sutton Mallet: Green Magic, 2004), 62-63;
Ann Finnin, The Forge of Tubal Cain (Sunland, Calif.: Pendraig, 2008).
36. Janus-Mithras, Nuit-Hilaria and Mer-Amun, Wicca: The Ancient Way, (Toronto:
Isis-Urania, 1981).

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198 The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010)

could follow, without the need for an initiation into a pre-existing tradi-
tion. Best known amongst these was Scott Cunninghams Wicca: A Guide
for the Solitary Practitioner (1988), in which he clearly accepted the idea
that the eclectic form of the Craft that he was propagating was a form
of Wicca.37 This book proved to be probably the most influential text on
the subject of Pagan Witchcraft published in the 1980s, selling tens of
thousands of copies and being reprinted several times in future decades.
It no doubt provided a huge boost to the idea of Wicca being a term
that covered the entirety of the Pagan Witchcraft movement, something
which would only be solidified with the publication in ensuing years of
works like Gerina Dunwhichs The Wicca Garden (1996), D.J. Conways
Wicca: The Complete Craft (2001), Raymond Bucklands Wicca for Life (2004)
and Wicca for One (2004), Arin Murphy-Hiscocks Solitary Wicca for Life
(2005), and Ann-Marie Gallaghers The Wicca Bible (2005), all of which
propagated their own eclectic variants of the Pagan Craft designed for
those who wished to initiate themselves. However, the biggest name in
the do-it-yourself Pagan Craft book market after Cunningham was
a controversial American author who went under the pseudonym of
Silver RavenWolf. In her books, such as Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Gen-
eration (1998), she equated Wicca as being simply another word for
Pagan WitchCraft (as she unusually chose to spell it), and in doing
so again continued to be a heavy influence on how tens of thousands of
readers, particularly those from younger generations, developed their
terminology.38
This increasingly eclectic attitude to what could be defined under the
umbrella term of Wicca soon spread from the United Kingdom and
United States into other parts of the globe. In France, a minor Lucife-
rian or demonological group emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s
calling itself Le Wicca Franaise,whilst in India, the Pagan Witch Ipsita
Roy Chakraverti, who had been initiated into a highly New Age, femi-
nist-influenced version of the Craft in Canada, set about propagating her
own variation of the religion which she called Wicca.39 It also featured
in fiction as well, with the American teen novel Book of Shadows (2001),
written by Cate Tiernan, referring to a wide range of Pagan Craft tradi-
tions as Wicca, and in the United Kingdom that particular book and
its sequels were actually published by Puffin under the title of the Wicca

37. Scott Cunningham, Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner, (St. Paul:
Llewellyn, 1998).
38. Silver RavenWolf, Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation, (St. Paul, Minnesota:
Llewellyn, 1998).
39. Lamond, Fifty Years; Ipsita Roy Chakraverti, Beloved Witch: An Autobiography
(New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2000).

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 Doyle White The Meaning of Wicca 199

series.40
As this shows, by the 1990s, with the increasing popularity of eclectic
forms of Pagan Witchcraft, particularly amongst the younger genera-
tion, the term Wicca began to be used increasingly as a term of self-
designation by those with no training in Gardnerian or other related
traditions. In turn it began to be picked up and utilized in popular tel-
evision shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed. Indeed,
the very first episode of Charmed, screened on The WB network on 7
October 1998, was entitled Something Wicca This Way Comes, whilst
the tenth episode of the first season, aired on 13 January 1999, was enti-
tled Wicca Envy. Despite this use of the term Wicca in the episode
titles, the witches featured in the series were clearly not Wiccans in any
sense of the word, not having any religious or Pagan components to their
particular magical practices. Although Charmed ran for a further seven
seasons, Wicca would only be used once more in an episode title, that
of the season seven finale, Something Wicca This Way Goes?, which
directly emulated the title of the series debut episode.41 The fact that the
term had even been used at all in these episode titles is noteworthy for
two reasons. First of all it provides evidence for the fact that Wicca was
widely enough known in the United States to be used in popular culture.
Secondly it showed that the term Wicca had been used in reference to
a generic, fictional, and non-Pagan form of witchcraft, illustrating the
extent to quite how generic the term itself had become in popular usage.
In essence, many probably simply believed Wicca was an alternate
word for witchcraft or magic.

Wicca and Traditional Witchcraft

However, whilst there were those Pagan Witches who began to openly
embrace Wicca in reference to an increasingly large assortment of
magico-religious groups in the latter decades of the twentieth century,
at the same time there was a movement that took the very opposite
approach, limiting what could be viewed as Wiccan and firmly dis-
associating themselves from such a term. Amongst those particularly
vocal in their opposition to being labelled Wiccan were those Crafters
who call themselves Traditional Witches. Within this umbrella term
exist a variety of different magico-religious groups with a wide range
of philosophical and theological approaches, ranging from Luciferian

40. Cate Tiernan, Book of Shadows (London: Puffin Books, 2002 [2001]).
41. Charmed, The Internet Movie Database, http://uk.imdb.com/title/
tt0158552/.

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200 The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010)

and Gnostic through to Christian and Pagan. Whilst it would be fair

to say that many of these figures, not being Pagan, could not be con-
sidered to be Wiccan,there are a great number of self-professed Tra-
ditional Craft groups who adhere to theological beliefs and magical
praxes that are highly reminiscent of those belonging to Gardnerianism
and other Wiccan groups. Indeed, mid-twentieth century groups like
the Norfolk coven, the Horsa coven, the Clan of Tubal Cain, and even the
New Forest coven have all been referred to as Traditional Witches in
recent decades, despite the fact that members of some of them, such as
Sybil Leek and Alastair Clay-Egerton, accepted the term Wicca in ref-
erence to their Pagan traditions, recognizing the similarities with groups
like the Gardnerians and (incorrectly) believing that they had a common
origin from the Witch-Cult. In a similar vein, Rhiannon Ryall, an Eng-
lishwoman who had lived for many years in Australia, published a 1993
book entitled West Country Wicca. In it, Ryall made the claim (which
itself is highly unlikely and dismissed by historian Ronald Hutton) that
there was a group of pre-Gardnerian practicing Pagan Witches scattered
throughout several villages in Englands West Country when she was
growing up there in the 1940s, and which, as the title of the book sug-
gests, she called Wicca.42
On this topic, Clay-Egerton, who was involved with Luciferian as
well as Pagan Witchcraft, publicly stated that Witches should Let Wicca
encompass all those of whatever path they follow, who truly see them-
selves as being Wicca, also defining Wicca, as the practice of modern
witchcraft in its many forms has now become known.43 Despite having
an alleged pre-Gardnerian lineage (Clay-Egerton claimed to have been
initiated in 1943 by a coven meeting at Alderley Edge in Cheshire), he
openly referred to himself as a Wiccan in conversation.44 However, some
of his followers have taken something of a revisionist stance against
his attitude since his death, with one of the most prominent, Melusine
Draco, stating that He was most certainly not Wiccan, being a constant
irritation to most of them.45 Such an attitude, which I have personally
found to be widespread amongst many professed Traditional Witches,
and which is evident from several published works on the topic of the

42. Rhiannon Ryall, West Country Wicca: A Journal of the Old Religion (Chieveley,
Berkshire: Capall Bann, 1993); Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of
Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 302.
43. A.R. Clay-Egerton, Coven of the Scales: The Collected Writings of A.R. Clay-Egerton
(London: Ignotus Press, 2002), 14, 47.
44. Steve Wilson, personal communication, 22 September 2010.
45. Melusine Draco, foreword to Coven of the Scales: The collected writings of A.R.
Clay-Egerton, by A.R. Clay-Egerton, (Ignotus Press, 2002), 05.

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 Doyle White The Meaning of Wicca 201

Traditional Craft, shows how powerfully the term Wiccan can actu-
ally divide people within the Pagan Witchcraft movement, and displays
an us and them mentality between self-professed Traditional Witches
and more Gardnerian-influenced forms of the religion.46
It is important here that we look at why it is that so many Traditional
Witches have been so vehement in their rejection of Wicca as a defin-
ing term. Some of those who have done so, such as Shani Oates of the
Clan of Tubal Cain and Trystyn M. Branwynn of the American-based
Clan Bol, have argued against being labelled as such because their par-
ticular groups hold to Luciferian and Gnostic beliefs that differ funda-
mentally from those of Pagan Witchcraft.47 Other Traditional Witches
have, however, rejected the term on what could be seen as more spuri-
ous grounds. One American Traditionalist informed me that his form of
the Traditional Craft differed from Wicca because in his view, Wicca
(by this meaning the Gardnerian-based traditions) was simply a form
of Co-Masonry (an idea presumably obtained from the fact that Co-
Masonry was an early influence on Gardnerianism), something which I
believe shows fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and history
of Pagan Witchcraft. Similar sentiments regarding a supposed funda-
mental difference between Traditional and Wiccan (i.e. Gardnerian-
based) forms of the Pagan Craft are regularly expressed in the literature
on the topic: Tony Steele defines Traditionalism as the witchcraft of the
ancestors, something he contrasts with modern witchcraft, whilst both
Nigel G. Pearson and the writer going under the pseudonym of Gwyn
define Traditionalism as being anything pre-Gardnerian.48 In effect, the
Traditional Craft is usually defined as being specifically in contrast with
Wicca (i.e. Gardnerian-based traditions).
It seems evident that on the whole, a significant number, if not the
majority of self-described Traditional Witches explicitly reserve the
term Wicca for Gardnerian-based forms of Pagan Witchcraft, in some
cases expanding this to include more recent forms of the Craft, such as
Dianic. I believe that one of the key reasons for Traditionalists wishing
to distance themselves from the Gardnerian-based mainstream was that
they saw it as becoming too intertwined and influenced by the New
Age movement, with its iconographical emphasis on white light, and

46. See for instance Gwyn, Light from the Shadows: A Mythos of Modern Traditional
Witchcraft (Chieveley, Berkshire: Capall Bann, 1999), 03; Tony Steele, The Rites &
Rituals of Traditional Witchcraft (Milverton, Somerset: Capall Bann, 2001), 01; Nigel
G. Pearson, Treading the Mill: Practical Craftworking in Modern Traditional Witchcraft
(Milverton, Somerset: Capall Bann, 2007), 07-08.
47. Shani Oates and Trystyn M. Branwynn, personal communication.
48. Steele, Rites & Rituals, 01; Pearson, Treading the Mill, 07-08; Gwyn, Light, 03.

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202 The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010)

its heavy use of eclecticism, something which they felt ran against the
grain of the traditional European idea that witchcraft was associated
with darkness. Doreen Valiente, who in her final published work had
come to embrace a more Traditional and Cochranian-based form of
the Craft than Gardnerianism, amply described this when she stated
that the Traditional Craft would appear disturbing to many readers
who were accustomed to the rather airy-fairy view of Wicca which has
become prevalent today, with its merry ring-dances in the nude and its
insistence on a bland attitude of optimism and love towards all.49
A second reason is that by designating themselves as Traditional
Witches, these practitioners are harking back to the idea that the contem-
porary Witchcraft movement has connections to historical and even pre-
historic forms of witchcraft and Paganism. The Gardnerian movement
had been effectively exposed as being twentieth-century in construction
by the studies of Aidan Kelly and Ronald Hutton during the 1980s and
1990s, and it would be unsurprising that in order to continue maintain-
ing the strongly held belief in a historical connection to old traditions,
many Pagan Witches would begin referring to themselves as Tradi-
tional Witches rather than Wiccans, with the latter terms specific
association with Gardnerianism. Indeed, Hutton noted that he knew of
three covens which had been founded in the 1980s, all claiming to be
Wiccan, who in the 1990s switched to referring to themselves as Tra-
ditional Witches.50

Conclusion
So far in this essay, I have endeavoured to display the evolution of the
word Wicca and those words that are etymologically associated with
it. The root behind all of these is undoubtedly the Old English wicca,
a term that not only provided the basis for the Modern English term
witch but which also provided many contemporary Pagans with an
archaic word that in some manner connected them with their ancient
polytheistic forebears. The earliest possible evidence of this Mediae-
val term influencing the contemporary movement comes from 1939,
when the New Forest coven were supposedly making use of a word
that Gardner would go on to spell Wica, and which he used to refer
to the Pagan Craft community as an entity. In the late 1950s, Gardners
rival, Charles Cardell, had begun referring to Pagan Witches themselves

49. Doreen Valiente, Preface to Witchcraft: A Tradition Renewed, by Evan John Jones,
(London: Hale, 1990), 07.
50. Hutton, Triumph, 385.

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 Doyle White The Meaning of Wicca 203

as Wiccens and by the late 1960s and early 1970s the later Gardneri-
ans, Alexandrians, and the Frosts were referring to Pagan Witchcraft as
Wicca or the Wicca. Soon this terminology spread across the occult
community in both Britain and the United States. During this decade,
there was an explosion of new Pagan Craft traditions, particularly in the
North America, many of whom, in an attempt to disassociate themselves
from Gardnerianism-Alexandrianism, refused to define themselves as
Wiccan, identifying it as a term that could only apply to those tradi-
tions themselves. Then, in the1980s, many of the new, solitary, eclectic
Pagan Witches, who were publicizing their Craft through the publica-
tion of books, once more began using Wicca in its original all-inclusive
usage and self-describing themselves as Wiccans.
As I believe that this wealth of evidence displays, there are two alter-
native yet identifiable definitions of Wicca that have been used within
both Pagan and academic circles for the last thirty years and which con-
tinue to be utilized. The firstand apparently olderdefinition uses the
term in a broad, inclusive manner that covers most, if not all, forms of
modern Pagan Witchcraft, particularly if they share sufficiently similar
theological beliefs, dates of commemoration and magical praxes. The
second uses the term to refer specifically to the tradition of Gardnerian
Witchcraft, along with those which are heavily based upon it with little
variation, namely Alexandrian and Algard Witchcraft. In North America
these particular groups are sometimes collectively called British Tradi-
tional Wicca because of their shared origins and liturgies.
The reasons why practitioners of Pagan Witchcraft might choose to
adopt a certain definition are myriad, and will differ widely not only
across continents but also likely amongst covens and amongst individu-
als. A sociological study into how Pagan Witches use their terminology
would be invaluable here, although as this author is unaware of any
such study, I can instead only provide some suggestions, based upon my
own personal experience with the Pagan and occult communities. The
most prominent reason that people choose to use one over the other, and
to therefore consider themselves a Wiccan, Witch, or Traditional
Witch must likely be because that is what they have been taught to do,
either by coven members, friends, or through books. How important
that definition is to them is also something that most probably differs
widely. For some practitioners, I believe that the word Wiccan is an
intrinsic part of their identity, making them feel like they are a part of a
community. In this manner it can also be used as a symbol of pride, or of
self-designation, and can be a sign of personal defiance against a domi-
nant community that is primarily of another faith. It might be avidly
preferred over the term Witch with its negative connotations or could

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204 The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010)

be rejected by those practitioners who actively embrace being labelled

so controversially.
It has been noted by the likes of Graham Harvey that the first, more
inclusive definition is more common in North America than in Britain,
although I would contest that, from personal experience, the former def-
inition is also becoming more popular in the Crafts homeland, particu-
larly amongst younger British Pagan Witches, many of whom have been
influenced by American literature and media on the subject.51 Exam-
ining the published books on the topic, it would also appear that on
both sides of the Atlantic, there are writers who are utilizing differing
definitions, with British authors such as Stewart Farrar (1971), Anthony
Kemp (1993), and Frederic Lamond (2004) adhering to the first defini-
tion, whilst others, like Vivianne Crowley (1996) and Michael Howard
(2009), instead making use of the second.52 Similarly, in the United States,
authors such as Scott Cunningham (1988), Silver RavenWolf (1998),
Margot Adler (2006) and Aidan Kelly (2007) have used the former defi-
nition, but others, such as Starhawk (1989), Raven Grimassi (2000) and
M. Macha NightMare (2001), have instead held to the latter.53 This shows
us that it far too simplistic to simply state that one definition is typically
British and the other is typically American.
This then brings up the question of which of these two terms is the
more widely used within the Wiccan and greater Pagan and occult com-
munities today. Gaining any sort of statistics from these groups is noto-
riously difficult, however, but taking the idea that the first definition is
the more popular in North America, which is itself the place where the
Wiccan population is almost certainly largest, I would suspect that in
the world today, there are more Pagans who use Wicca in the inclu-
sive manner, to refer to the totality of Pagan Witchcraft. Nonetheless,
this remains, I must stress, simply a suspicion, and is far from proven
at this time.
Following on with this line of thought, it is worth exploring which of
these two definitions is in fact more widespread in the academic commu-

51. Harvey, Listening People, 35-36.

52. Anthony Kemp, Witchcraft and Paganism Today (London: Michael OMara Books,
1993); Vivianne Crowley, Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium (London: Har-
perCollins, 1996); Michael Howard, Modern Wicca: A History from Gerald Gardner to the
Present, (Woodbury, Minnesota: Llewellyn, 2009), 01.
53. Cunningham, Wicca; RavenWolf, Teen Witch; Margot Adler, Drawing Down
the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers and Other Pagans in America (London:
Penguin, 2006 [1979], 10; Kelly, Inventing Witchcraft; Starhawk, Spiral Dance; Raven
Grimassi, Italian Witchcraft: The Old Religion of Southern Europe (Woodbury, Minne-
sota: Llewellyn, 2000); M. Macha NightMare, Witchcraft and the Web: Weaving Pagan
Traditions Online, (Toronto: ECW Press, 2002), 26-27.

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 Doyle White The Meaning of Wicca 205

nity. This is something that is more easily uncovered via a simple exami-
nation of the published material by the leading figures in Pagan and
esoteric studies. The American Margot Adler took the first definition in
her study of Paganism in the United States, as did Aidan Kelly in his in-
depth study of the sources behind Gardnerian liturgy.54 Chas S. Clifton,
in his further study of American Paganism, noted the existence of both
definitions, but in general held to the former, for instance describing
Starhawk as a Wiccan.55 Amongst British academics within this field,
there appears to be a tendency to be more noncommittal to either defini-
tion. For instance, Graham Harvey, in his study of the Pagan movement,
notes both definitions but does not subscribe to either, whilst the British
historian Ronald Hutton, in his seminal study of Wiccan history, did not
make his usage of the term at all clear.56 Although it therefore appears
that the academic community, or at least those within the academic
community who have published most widely on this topic, have prima-
rily adopted the first definition, there is clearly still a level of disagree-
ment and confusion on the matter. This inconsistency in usage within
academia has sometimes led to issues arising even within the same pub-
lication. As a case in point, in The New Generation Witches: Teenage Witch-
craft in Contemporary Culture, an anthology edited by Helen E. Johnston
and Peg Aloi and published by Ashgate in 2007, one contributor, the
practicing American Witch Stephanie Martin, used Wicca to refer to
the entirety of the Pagan Witchcraft movement, whilst the British occult-
ist Julian Vayne instead utilized the alternate definition.57
I believe that for multiple reasons the adoption of the former defi-
nition is the more logical option for scholars to use when discussing
the Pagan Witchcraft movement. However, that is not to say that any
particular definition should, or indeed could, be implemented univer-
sally. Any attempt by the academic or wider scholarly community to try
and impose a singular definition would without doubt be resented and
ignored by a large number of Crafters. It would be better to argue simply
that because there are multivocal approaches regarding the definition of
Wicca, every writer should make it clear which definition they are uti-

54. Adler, Drawing Down; Kelly, Inventing Witchcraft.

55. Clifton, Her Hidden Children, 58.
56. Harvey, Listening People; Hutton, Triumph, 298-302.
57. Stephanie Martin, Teen Witchcraft and Silver RavenWolf: The Internet and its
impact on community opinion, in The New Generation Witches: Teenage Witchcraft in
Contemporary Culture, ed. Hannah E. Johnston and Peg Aloi, (Aldershot, Hampshire:
Ashgate, 2007), 130-132; Julian Vayne, The Discovery of Witchcraft: An Exploration
of the Changing Face Of Witchcraft Through Contemporary Interview and Personal
Reflection, in The New Generation Witches: Teenage Witchcraft in Contemporary Culture,
ed. Hannah E. Johnston and Peg Aloi, (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), 57.

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206 The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010)

lizing, something that has been too often neglected in the past.

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