Male shamans "dressed in skins and horns in identification with the God and the herds," but priestesses "presided naked, embodying the fertility of the Goddess. Each year these prehistoric worshippers celebrated the seasonal cycles, which led to the "eight feasts of the Wheel": the solstices, the equinoxes, and four festivals—Imbolc February 2, now coinciding with the Christian feast of Candlemas , Beltane May Day , Lammas or Lughnasad in early August , and Samhain our Halloween.
This nature-attuned, woman-respecting, peaceful, and egalitarian culture prevailed in what is now Western Europe for thousands of years, Starhawk wrote, until Indo-European invaders swept across the region, introducing warrior gods, weapons designed for killing human beings, and patriarchal civilization. Then came Christianity, which eventually insinuated itself among Europe's ruling elite.
Still, the "Old Religion" lived, often in the guise of Christian practices. Starting in the fourteenth century, Starhawk argued, religious and secular authorities began a year campaign to eradicate the Old Religion by exterminating suspected adherents, whom they accused of being in league with the devil.
Most of the persecuted were women, generally those outside the social norm—not only the elderly and mentally ill but also midwives, herbal healers, and natural leaders, those women whose independent ways were seen as a threat. During "the Burning Times," Starhawk wrote, some nine million were executed. The Old Religion went more deeply underground, its traditions passed down secretly in families and among trusted friends, until it resurfaced in the twentieth century.
Like their ancient forebears, Wiccans revere the Goddess, practice shamanistic magic of a harmless variety, and celebrate the eight feasts, or sabbats, sometimes in the nude. Subject to slight variations, this story is the basis of many hugely popular Goddess handbooks. It also informs the writings of numerous secular feminists— Gloria Steinem , Marilyn French , Barbara Ehrenreich , Deirdre English—to whom the ascendancy of "the patriarchy" or the systematic terrorization of strong, independent women by means of witchcraft trials are historical givens.
Moreover, elements of the story suffuse a broad swath of the intellectual and literary fabric of the past hundred years, from James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Robert Graves's The White Goddess to the novels of D. Lawrence, from the writings of William Butler Yeats and T.
Eliot to Jungian psychology and the widely viewed public-television series The Power of Myth. In all probability, not a single element of the Wiccan story is true.
The evidence is overwhelming that Wicca is a distinctly new religion, a s concoction influenced by such things as Masonic ritual and a late-nineteenth-century fascination with the esoteric and the occult, and that various assumptions informing the Wiccan view of history are deeply flawed. Furthermore, scholars generally agree that there is no indication, either archaeological or in the written record, that any ancient people ever worshipped a single, archetypal goddess—a conclusion that strikes at the heart of Wiccan belief.
IN the past few years two well-respected scholars have independently advanced essentially the same theory about Wicca's founding.
In Philip G. Gardner Davis wrote that the origins of the Goddess movement lay in an interest among the German and French Romantics—mostly men—in natural forces, especially those linked with women. Gardner admired the Romantics and belonged to a Rosicrucian society called the Fellowship of Crotona—a group that was influenced by several late-nineteenth-century occultist groups, which in turn were influenced by Freemasonry.
In the s Gardner introduced a religion he called and spelled Wica. Although Gardner claimed to have learned Wiccan lore from a centuries-old coven of witches who also belonged to the Fellowship of Crotona, Davis wrote that no one had been able to locate the coven and that Gardner had invented the rites he trumpeted, borrowing from rituals created early in the twentieth century by the notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley , among others. Wiccans today, by their own admission, have freely adapted and embellished Gardner's rites.
Hutton had conducted detailed research into the known pagan practices of prehistory, had read Gardner's unpublished manuscripts, and had interviewed many of Gardner's surviving contemporaries.
Gardner seems to have drawn on the work of two people: Charles Godfrey Leland , a nineteenth-century amateur American folklorist who professed to have found a surviving cult of the goddess Diana in Tuscany, and Margaret Alice Murray , a British Egyptologist who herself drew on Leland's ideas and, beginning in the s, created a detailed framework of ritual and belief.
From his own experience Gardner included such Masonic staples as blindfolding, initiation, secrecy, and "degrees" of priesthood. He incorporated various Tarot-like paraphernalia, including wands, chalices, and the five-pointed star, which, enclosed in a circle, is the Wiccan equivalent of the cross.
Gardner also wove in some personal idiosyncrasies. One was a fondness for linguistic archaisms: "thee," "thy," "'tis," "Ye Bok of ye Art Magical. Some Gardnerian innovations have sexual and even bondage-and-discipline overtones.
Ritual sex, which Gardner called "The Great Rite," and which was also largely unknown in antiquity, was part of the liturgy for Beltane and other feasts although most participants simulated the act with a dagger—another of Gardner's penchants—and a chalice. Other rituals called for the binding and scourging of initiates and for administering "the fivefold kiss" to the feet, knees, "womb" according to one Wiccan I spoke with, a relatively modest spot above the pubic bone , breasts, and lips.
Hutton effectively demolished the notion, held by Wiccans and others, that fundamentally pagan ancient customs existed beneath medieval Christian practices. His research reveals that outside of a handful of traditions, such as decorating with greenery at Yuletide and celebrating May Day with flowers, no pagan practices—much less the veneration of pagan gods—have survived from antiquity. Hutton found that nearly all the rural seasonal pastimes that folklorists once viewed as "timeless" fertility rituals, including the Maypole dance, actually date from the Middle Ages or even the eighteenth century.
There is now widespread consensus among historians that Catholicism thoroughly permeated the mental world of medieval Europe, introducing a robust popular culture of saints' shrines, devotions, and even charms and spells.
The idea that medieval revels were pagan in origin is a legacy of the Protestant Reformation. Hutton has also pointed out a lack of evidence that either the ancient Celts or any other pagan culture celebrated all the "eight feasts of the Wheel" that are central to Wiccan liturgy. Historians have overturned another basic Wiccan assumption: that the group has a history of persecution exceeding even that of the Jews. The figure Starhawk cited—nine million executed over four centuries—derives from a late-eighteenth-century German historian; it was picked up and disseminated a hundred years later by a British feminist named Matilda Gage and quickly became Wiccan gospel Gardner himself coined the phrase "the Burning Times".
Most scholars today believe that the actual number of executions is in the neighborhood of 40, The most thorough recent study of historical witchcraft is Witches and Neighbors , by Robin Briggs, a historian at Oxford University.
Briggs pored over the documents of European witch trials and concluded that most of them took place during a relatively short period, to , and were largely confined to parts of present-day France, Switzerland, and Germany that were already racked by the religious and political turmoil of the Reformation. The accused witches, far from including a large number of independent-minded women, were mostly poor and unpopular. Their accusers were typically ordinary citizens often other women , not clerical or secular authorities.
In fact, the authorities generally disliked trying witchcraft cases and acquitted more than half of all defendants. Briggs also discovered that none of the accused witches who were found guilty and put to death had been charged specifically with practicing a pagan religion. If Internet chat rooms are any indication, some Wiccans cling tenaciously to the idea of themselves as institutional victims on a large scale.
Generally speaking, though, Wiccans appear to be accommodating themselves to much of the emerging evidence concerning their antecedents: for example, they are coming to view their ancient provenance as inspiring legend rather than hard-and-fast history. By the end of the s, with the appearance of Davis's book and then of Hutton's, many Wiccans had begun referring to their story as a myth of origin, not a history of survival.
The concepts of the devil and hell are part of Christian theology and have never existed in the Wiccan religion, according to "Wiccan Beliefs and Practices" Llewellyn Worldwide, Wiccans also do not believe in one almighty God , but in many gods and goddesses, according to "Essential Wicca" The Crossing Press, This places Wicca in the same category as Buddhism and Hinduism as a polytheistic religion. Since Wicca is a nature-based religion, followers are encouraged to respect all living things.
Wiccans make sacrifices or offerings to their chosen deities , but these offerings are usually bread, fruit, wine or flowers, according to "A Wiccan Bible" Career Press, We never harm or kill them in our rites or spells. Blood sacrifice of any sort is against our law. That 'eye of newt and toe of frog' stuff is nonsense," according to "The Wicca Handbook" Weiser, There is no bible that Wiccans follow. Wiccans may make a "Book of Shadows" for themselves, or may pass one down from a teacher of the faith to his or her student, but that BoS serves as a reference book, according to "Living Wicca" Llewellyn Worldwide, Also referred to as a grimoire, mirror book or magical diary, a BoS is a customized book in which a Wiccan records information he or she finds useful to practicing the faith.
While not every Wiccan has a BoS, those that do fill theirs with myths, ceremonies, spells, religious ritual instructions, prayers, herbal lore or personal records of dreams, according to "Living Wicca. Live Science.
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