Wicca Religion

Wicca is a rapidly growing neopagan religious movement that is a nature based religion that celebrates the changing of the seasons and with a belief in a Divine that it is manifested into two aspects; the God and the Goddess that is revitalizing the “Old Ways”. There are generally two schools of thought about the history of Wicca as a religion. One is that Wicca is a continuous hidden witchcraft religion that had its start in paleolithic times then went underground and remained hidden during the Burning Times where Christianity came to the forefront, and the other is that Wicca is a modern reconstruction of the old pagan religions. The word wicca finds its roots in the old Anglo-Saxon word wicce that means one who practices sorcery with

Many regard the publishing of this book as the event that founded Wicca. In this book Gardner called himself a witch and claimed to have been initiated into the Craft in 1939 by Old Dorothy Clutterbuck from the New Forest Coven. Gardner claimed that his Book of Shadows came to him in a fragmentary form and had to be supplemented with other material to fill in the gaps and to make it workable. His obvious influences were Aleister Crowley and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Margaret Murray and her books The Witch Cult in Western Europe and The God of the Witches, Charles Godfrey Leland and his book Aradia: Gospel of the Witches, along with his knowledge of ceremonial magic and masonry. Masonry played a fairly significant role in Gardnerian Wicca. Gardner pulled from the Freemasons several of the ritual structures, the initiationary phases, along with the phrase So Mote It Be. So mote it be is the mason form of Amen, which they use to end prayers and rituals, and Wiccans use it in a very similar manner. In Wicca, it is used to denote the ending of a ritual, prayer, rite or working. Gardner published his second book on witchcraft The Meaning of Witchcraft in 1959. From this second book Gardner gave us the modern use of the word wicca, even though he used the word spelled wica. Wicca has come to mean religious witchcraft. Regardless, Gerald Gardner brought Wicca as

Those who followed the Gardner tradition of Wicca were called Gardnerians and the Gardnerian tradition is initiatory which means you are initiated in stages. Raymond Buckland went on to found his own Wiccan path called Seax Wicca. Since that time Raymond Buckland has authored several books on Wicca and witchcraft including the Complete Book of Witchcraft (1986) and Wicca for One