Unit 2: Witchcraft

The modern revival of Witchcraft--or Wicca as it is know to its practitioners--began in England in the early 1950s with the efforts of Gerald B. Gardner, whose books Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959) attracted a large audience and helped to spark a movement of Witchcraft as religion on both sides of the Atlantic and in Australia. (We will be reading a selection from The Meaning of Witchcraft later in this unit.) The introduction of Wicca to America was spearheaded by two of Gardner's initiates, Raymond and Rosemary Buckland, during the metaphysical renaissance of the 1960s.

Wicca has been described as the fastest growing religion in North America today. Estimates vary, but according to the massive American Religious Identification Survey (2001) there currently are over 750,000 Wiccans in the U.S., with nearly 40,000 in Canada. Since the early 1990s the Wiccan population appears to have doubled in size every 2-1/2 years with an annual growth rate of around 17%, higher than any other religious group monitored. If these growth rates continue, Wicca may well become the third largest religion in the U.S. by 2012, behind Christianity and Judaism. As the noted Wiccan author Starhawk points out in "Witchcraft as a Goddess Religion," most converts to "the Craft of the Wise" or "the Old Religion," as it is sometimes called, have been women who feel disenfranchised by Christianity and Judaism, and are attracted to Wicca by the appeal of Goddess worship.

Despite its rapid growth, however, Wicca is probably the least understood and most maligned religion in America. More often than not, Witchcraft is falsely equated with black magic and Satanism in the popular imagination and the media, which keeps most Wiccans from practicing their religion openly. In "The Witch as a Frightening and Threatening Figure," John Widdowson details the common stereotypes most people have of witches, many of which he points out are learned in childhood.

Most of the misconceptions people have of witches and Witchcraft date back to the Middle Ages. Demonologists issued writings describing the abominations of witches: how they worshipped the Devil in obscene rites, ate babies, destroyed crops and herds, raised tempests and hailstorms, and killed their neighbors. The most notorious of these writings was the Malleus Malificarum (1487), written by German Inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. For over 250 years after its publication, the Malleus Malificarum was the official handbook for witch-hunting. It aided Inquisitors and secular authorities in the execution of an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 people--mostly women--for witchcraft, most during what historians call the Burning Times, roughly 1550-1650. In America, the worst case was the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 and 1693, in which 141 people were falsely arrested on the basis of accusations by hysterical children; nineteen were hung and one was pressed to death. (In our selection from Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), Puritan Cotton Mather describes the case against the accused.) Of the thousands executed for witchcraft during these times, nearly 80% were women, leading historian Christina Larner to ask: "Was Witch-Hunting Woman-Hunting?"

Though still ostracized for their beliefs, modern-day witches bear little resemblance to the stereotypes held by most Americans. As Judy Harrow describes in "Explaining Wicca," at its most basic, the framework of Wicca rests on reverence for--and worship of--the forces of nature. Though highly autonomous and diverse in their practices, central to most Wiccan beliefs is worship of the Goddess and her consort, the Horned God, though it is the Goddess who is given primacy. They are called by various names, but in all cases they embody the eternal self-regeneration of nature and the boundless vitality of the sexual urge. They are viewed in Wicca as the primordial parents of us all. They are present in the workings of nature and can be sought and supplicated by ritual and meditation. To worship them and work with them is the goal of most Wiccans.

The Goddess has existed as a powerful archetype since the Stone Age. She is symbolized by the vessel, the inexhaustible container of all wisdom and life forces, and as Carl Jung shows us in "The Mother Archetype," She appears in many different forms in our mythologies: the cauldron, the cup, the bowl, and in Christian mysteries as the Grail. She is the guardian of the human interior, of emotion, intuition, psychic forces, and mysteries. She is Creator, Nurturer, and Destroyer, and almost always is more powerful than the male gods. Moreover, as Janet and Stewart Farrar point out, in Wicca she is often represented as being in three archetypal forms--Maiden, Mother, and Crone--hence the term Triple Goddess. The Maiden is the waxing moon, virginal and pure, the bright magic of the female principle. The Mother is the full moon, sensuous and full-bodied. The Crone is the waning moon, whose knowledge encompasses the experiences of both Maiden and Mother, and whose wisdom brings balance to both.