What is Wicca?

Wicca is a religion of witchcraft. It honours the divine as a Goddess and a God, keeps eight seasonal festivals and the phases of the moon, works magic within a cast circle, and holds to a single hard ethic: harm none.

The shape of it

Wicca came into public view in Britain in the early 1950s, when the law against witchcraft was repealed and a retired civil servant named Gerald Gardner began to write and speak openly about the coven he said had initiated him. Whether that coven was quite what he described is a question historians still enjoy. What is certain is that Gardner, and shortly afterwards the poet Doreen Valiente, shaped the rituals, the liturgy and the ethic that almost every Wiccan today would recognise. Valiente's Charge of the Goddess remains the most beautiful thing in our tradition, and her later books gave countless solitary witches permission to begin.

From that root grew the traditions: Gardnerian, Alexandrian, and a hundred eclectic offshoots. By the 1970s and 80s, writers like Raymond Buckland, Starhawk and Scott Cunningham had carried Wicca to America and opened it to people without access to a coven. Today there are more solitary Wiccans than initiated ones, and both are real.

What Wiccans believe

There is no creed, and you will find Wiccans who disagree with everything on this list. But most of us would nod along to most of it:

The divine is immanent in nature and is known to us as Goddess and God, the two poles of a single whole, honoured under many names.
The year is a wheel, and its turning is sacred. We keep the two solstices, the two equinoxes and the four fire festivals between them.
The moon is the Goddess's lamp and her calendar. We gather at the full.
Magic is real, natural, and governed by ethics. It is worked within a cast circle, between the worlds.
An it harm none, do what ye will. The Wiccan Rede is our ethic, and it is harder than it sounds.
What we send out returns to us, often multiplied. Many call this the Threefold Law.
Death is a turning of the wheel, not an end. Many of us speak of the Summerland and of rebirth.

We go into each of these in Beliefs and Ethics.

Initiation, dedication, and the year and a day

Traditional Wicca is initiatory: you enter by being brought in by someone who was themselves brought in, and the line of hands reaches back to the first covens. Initiation is never offered and never sold. It is asked for, and granted only after a period of study and acquaintance, traditionally a year and a day. Wicca does not seek converts; the seeker must do the seeking.

Eclectic and solitary Wiccans usually mark their beginning with a self-dedication, a private ritual of commitment to the Goddess and God and to the path. Our view at the Hearth is that both are real, and that the year and a day is wise for everyone. Read, practise, keep the Sabbats, and if you still want to dedicate yourself when the wheel has turned once around, you will know what you are promising.

Wicca and witchcraft

All Wiccans practise witchcraft; not all witches are Wiccan. Some traditional witches reject the word Wicca altogether and find its ritual too formal and its ethic too tidy. Some Wiccans prefer to downplay the witchcraft and speak of their religion in terms a vicar would understand. We think both of those positions lose something. The Craft is a religion with dirt under its nails, and that is the glory of it.

Is Wicca for you?

If you find yourself moved by the moon, by the smell of the first rain, by the idea that the divine has a woman's face as well as a man's, and by the demand that you take responsibility for every ripple you make, you might be a Wiccan already. Read the reading list, keep a Sabbat or two, and see how it sits. There is no hurry. The wheel keeps turning either way.

Next: What is Paganism?