Wicca (etymology)
Encyclopedia
The term "Wicca
" (ˈwɪkə) is commonly used to refer to the religion of contemporary Pagan Witchcraft, however there are two different definitions of the term currently being used in the Pagan community. The first and older definition uses it to refer to the entirety of the Pagan Witchcraft movement, whilst the second definition uses it to refer explicitly to those traditions within that movement that are based upon Gardnerian Wicca
and still use a Gardnerian liturgy in their ritual practices.
Although pronounced differently, scholars have suggested that the term took as its basis the Old English word wicca (/ˈwɪttʃɑ/), which referred to sorcery and the practice of magic in Anglo-Saxon England. In the early 1950s, the English occultist and pioneering Wiccan Gerald Gardner
, who had founded the Gardnerian tradition, began referring to the Pagan Witchcraft community as a whole as "the Wica", something which he claimed to have learned from the New Forest coven
of Pagan Witches in 1939 (whose very existence is debated by historians). By the late 1950s, one of Gardner's rivals, Charles Cardell
, the founder of the Cardellian tradition of Pagan Witchcraft, had begun referring to the religion's followers as "Wiccens", with one scholar positing that he might have invented the term "Wicca" in reference to the religion itself.
The trend for referring to the Pagan Witchcraft religion as "Wicca" has been traced to the early 1960s, when it was adopted by figures like Alex Sanders
, the founder of the Alexandrian tradition
, and Gavin and Yvonne Frost, the founders of the Church of Wicca
.
Various scholars involved in the field of Pagan Studies have discussed the development and use of the term "Wicca" within the contemporary Pagan community, with early attempts being made by American academic Chas S. Clifton
(2006) to examine its development in the United States, and the British Gardnerian initiate Melissa Seims (2008) looked at its early development in England. A fuller examination of the subject was later made by English Pagan Studies scholar Ethan Doyle White (2010), which established a chronology of the term's usage throughout Wiccan history
.
According to Doyle White, the latter term instead uses the term "to refer specifically to the tradition of Gardnerian Witchcraft, along with those that are heavily based upon it with little variation, namely Alexandrian and Algard Witchcraft." He traced this definition's origins to the United States.
, literary scholar Chas S. Clifton
and Religious Studies scholar Aidan A. Kelly, whilst those that took the latter included British historian Joanne Pearson.
, the man largely responsible for propagating the Wiccan religion in Britain during the 1950s and 60s and the founder of the Gardnerian tradition
, never used the term "Wicca" in either sense that it is used today, instead he always referred to the religion as the "cult of witchcraft" or "the witch-cult", the latter likely being a term borrowed from Margaret Murray
, who wrote a book entitled The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921). Gardner did however use the term Wica, which he always spelt with only one "c", in his writings. This was not used to refer to the religion itself, but to the religion's practitioners; in his 1954 work Witchcraft Today
, he uses the word thrice, at one point stating that:
From Witchcraft Today therefore it shows that Gardner considered Wica to be a plurale tantum
that referred to the Witches collectively. However, in an interview with one reporter for the Daily Dispatch in 1954, Gardner supposedly told him that "there are man and woman witches. Each is called a wica." In this manner therefore it seems that the term Wica was used be Gardner to apply to individual Witches (i.e. "a wica") as well as to the community as a whole (i.e. "the Wica").
In his later book The Meaning of Witchcraft
(1959) Gardner stated that he first heard the term Wica whilst being initiated into the New Forest coven
in September 1939, stating that "I realised I had stumbled on something interesting; but 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." This account was repeated in his biography, Gerald Gardner: Witch (1960), written by Idries Shah
but attributed to Jack L. Bracelin
, in which he is quoted as saying that "it was halfway through when the word Wica was first mentioned; and I knew that that which I had thought burnt out hundreds of years ago still survived." In The Meaning of Witchcraft, Gardner noted the term Wicas resemblance to the Old English word wicca (ˈwɪtʃɑ), which in the Anglo-Saxon
period meant a male sorcerer and provided the basis for the modern English
witch, stating that "It is a curious fact that when the witches became English-speaking they adopted their Saxon name 'Wica'."
Wica became an accepted term amongst the early Gardnerians, as Gardner's followers and initiates became known.
For instance, Patricia
and Arnold Crowther
used the term in their work The Witches Speak (1959) when they wrote that "[T]he Red Queen told Alice
that she made words mean what wanted them to mean. She might very well have been talking about witchcraft, for today it is used to describe anything that one wishes to use it for. From the simple meaning "the craft of the Wica," it is used in connection with Black Magic
, Satanism
, Black Mass
es..." Another Gardnerian to use the term was Raymond Buckland
in Witchcraft - the Religion (1966), when he stated that "Today more and more people are turning to the Wica, finding the answer to their religious needs."
was a Witch who led a rival tradition to Gardner's in England during the 1950s. After their falling out in 1958, Cardell set out to discredit him, and eventually published many of the then-secret Gardnerian rituals in 1964. Cardell used the term "Wiccen" to refer not just to members of his tradition, but to all followers of the Craft, placing an advert in Light magazine in 1958 asking all genuine "Wiccens" to get in contact with him. Several years later, when Cardell took the Evening News to court for publishing an account of his coven's rituals, he used the defence that he had never really believed in Witchcraft at all, but had only been pretending to do so in order to infiltrate the Gardnerians, which he claimed were a dangerous cult. As a part of this, the woman who claimed to be his sister, Mary Cardell, told the court that it had been Charles who himself had invented the term "Wiccen".
The researcher Melissa Seims, herself a Gardnerian initiate, believed it likely that Cardell himself had also used the term "Wicca", though in what context she did not elaborate on. This was because Margaret Bruce, a friend of Gardner's, wrote him a short poem about the Cardells and their tradition which stated:
being the only major use of the four-letter spelling. The first published appearance of the spelling Wicca is in June John's 1969 book King of the Witches: The World of Alex Sanders. The word's first appearance within the title of a book was in Wicca: The Ancient Way published in 1981. The earliest evidence of the common adjectival form "Wiccan", also used as a noun, dates from the 1970s.
Wicca
Wicca , is a modern Pagan religious movement. Developing in England in the first half of the 20th century, Wicca was popularised in the 1950s and early 1960s by a Wiccan High Priest named Gerald Gardner, who at the time called it the "witch cult" and "witchcraft," and its adherents "the Wica."...
" (ˈwɪkə) is commonly used to refer to the religion of contemporary Pagan Witchcraft, however there are two different definitions of the term currently being used in the Pagan community. The first and older definition uses it to refer to the entirety of the Pagan Witchcraft movement, whilst the second definition uses it to refer explicitly to those traditions within that movement that are based upon Gardnerian Wicca
Gardnerian Wicca
Gardnerian Wicca, or Gardnerian Witchcraft, is a mystery cult tradition or denomination in the neopagan religion of Wicca, whose members can trace initiatory descent from Gerald Gardner. The tradition is itself named after Gardner , a British civil servant and scholar of magic...
and still use a Gardnerian liturgy in their ritual practices.
Although pronounced differently, scholars have suggested that the term took as its basis the Old English word wicca (/ˈwɪttʃɑ/), which referred to sorcery and the practice of magic in Anglo-Saxon England. In the early 1950s, the English occultist and pioneering Wiccan Gerald Gardner
Gerald Gardner
Gerald Brousseau Gardner , who sometimes used the craft name Scire, was an influential English Wiccan, as well as an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist, writer, weaponry expert and occultist. He was instrumental in bringing the Neopagan religion of Wicca to public attention in Britain and...
, who had founded the Gardnerian tradition, began referring to the Pagan Witchcraft community as a whole as "the Wica", something which he claimed to have learned from the New Forest coven
New Forest coven
The New Forest coven were a group of Neopagan witches or Wiccans who allegedly met around the area of the New Forest in southern England during the 1930s and 1940s...
of Pagan Witches in 1939 (whose very existence is debated by historians). By the late 1950s, one of Gardner's rivals, Charles Cardell
Charles Cardell
Charles Cardell was an English Wiccan who propagated his own tradition of the Craft, which was distinct from that of Gerald Gardner. Cardell's tradition of Wicca was based around a form of the Horned God known as Atho, and worked with a coven that met in the grounds of his estate in Surrey. His...
, the founder of the Cardellian tradition of Pagan Witchcraft, had begun referring to the religion's followers as "Wiccens", with one scholar positing that he might have invented the term "Wicca" in reference to the religion itself.
The trend for referring to the Pagan Witchcraft religion as "Wicca" has been traced to the early 1960s, when it was adopted by figures like Alex Sanders
Alex Sanders (Wiccan)
Alex Sanders , born Orrell Alexander Carter, was an English occultist and High Priest in the Neopagan religion of Wicca, responsible for founding the tradition of Alexandrian Wicca during the 1960s. He was a figure who often appeared in tabloid newspapers...
, the founder of the Alexandrian tradition
Alexandrian Wicca
Alexandrian Wicca is a tradition of the Neopagan religion of Wicca, founded by Alex Sanders who, with his wife Maxine Sanders, established the tradition in the United Kingdom in the 1960s...
, and Gavin and Yvonne Frost, the founders of the Church of Wicca
Church and School of Wicca
The Church and School of Wicca was founded by Gavin Frost and Yvonne Frost in 1968. It was the first federally recognized Church of the religion known as Wicca in the United States. It is well known for its correspondence courses on the Frosts' unique interpretation of Wicca...
.
Various scholars involved in the field of Pagan Studies have discussed the development and use of the term "Wicca" within the contemporary Pagan community, with early attempts being made by American academic Chas S. Clifton
Chas S. Clifton
Chas S. Clifton is an American academic, author and historian who specialises in the fields of English studies and Pagan studies. Clifton currently holds a teaching position in English at Colorado State University-Pueblo, prior to which he taught at Pueblo Community College.A practicing Pagan...
(2006) to examine its development in the United States, and the British Gardnerian initiate Melissa Seims (2008) looked at its early development in England. A fuller examination of the subject was later made by English Pagan Studies scholar Ethan Doyle White (2010), which established a chronology of the term's usage throughout Wiccan history
History of Wicca
The history of Wicca documents the rise of the Neopagan religion of Wicca and related witchcraft-based Neopagan religions. Wicca originated in the early twentieth century, when it first developed amongst several secretive covens in England who were basing their religious beliefs and practices upon...
.
Definitions
In a 2010 paper of his published in The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, scholar Ethan Doyle White noted that there were two separate definitions of the term "Wicca" that had been used in "both Pagan and academic circles [over] the last thirty years." Commenting on the first definition, Doyle White remarked that it "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" to be recognised as parts of the same religion. He traced its origins to the 1960s, when it was used by Alex Sanders and members of his Alexandrian tradition, which was then developing in England.According to Doyle White, the latter term instead uses the term "to refer specifically to the tradition of Gardnerian Witchcraft, along with those that are heavily based upon it with little variation, namely Alexandrian and Algard Witchcraft." He traced this definition's origins to the United States.
Usage within Pagan Studies
Doyle White himself felt that "for multiple reasons the adoption of the former definition is the more logical option for scholars" to use when discussing Pagan Witchcraft, but accepted that it would be difficult, if not ethically dubious, for academics to "try and impose a singular definition" of the term upon the Pagan community. If this was attempted, he went on, it would most likely be "resented and ignored" by many Pagans themselves. He did however make an examination of which definitions were employed by different academics and independent scholars working in the field of Pagan Studies, coming to the conclusion that the majority had used the first, more inclusive definition, but that there was still "a level of disagreement and confusion on the matter." Among those who had used the former definition were American sociologist Margot AdlerMargot Adler
Margot Adler is an author, journalist, lecturer, Wiccan priestess and radio journalist and correspondent for National Public Radio .- Early life :Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Adler grew up mostly in New York City...
, literary scholar Chas S. Clifton
Chas S. Clifton
Chas S. Clifton is an American academic, author and historian who specialises in the fields of English studies and Pagan studies. Clifton currently holds a teaching position in English at Colorado State University-Pueblo, prior to which he taught at Pueblo Community College.A practicing Pagan...
and Religious Studies scholar Aidan A. Kelly, whilst those that took the latter included British historian Joanne Pearson.
Old English wicca and wicce
In the early mediaeval language of Old English, the term wicca was used to refer to male sorcerors, whilst wicce was used to refer to their female counterparts.Gerald Gardner's Wica
Gerald GardnerGerald Gardner
Gerald Brousseau Gardner , who sometimes used the craft name Scire, was an influential English Wiccan, as well as an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist, writer, weaponry expert and occultist. He was instrumental in bringing the Neopagan religion of Wicca to public attention in Britain and...
, the man largely responsible for propagating the Wiccan religion in Britain during the 1950s and 60s and the founder of the Gardnerian tradition
Gardnerian Wicca
Gardnerian Wicca, or Gardnerian Witchcraft, is a mystery cult tradition or denomination in the neopagan religion of Wicca, whose members can trace initiatory descent from Gerald Gardner. The tradition is itself named after Gardner , a British civil servant and scholar of magic...
, never used the term "Wicca" in either sense that it is used today, instead he always referred to the religion as the "cult of witchcraft" or "the witch-cult", the latter likely being a term borrowed from Margaret Murray
Margaret Murray
Margaret Alice Murray was a prominent British Egyptologist and anthropologist. Primarily known for her work in Egyptology, which was "the core of her academic career," she is also known for her propagation of the Witch-cult hypothesis, the theory that the witch trials in the Early Modern period of...
, who wrote a book entitled The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921). Gardner did however use the term Wica, which he always spelt with only one "c", in his writings. This was not used to refer to the religion itself, but to the religion's practitioners; in his 1954 work Witchcraft Today
Witchcraft Today
In the book Gardner also repeats the claim, which had originated with Matilda Joslyn Gage, that 9 million victims were killed in the European witch-hunts." Current scholarly estimates of the number of people executed for witchcraft during this time period vary between about 40,000 and 100,000.The...
, he uses the word thrice, at one point stating that:
- What are [the witches] then? They are the people who call themselves the Wica, the "wise people", who practise the age‑old rites and who have, along with much superstition and herbal knowledge, preserved an occult teaching and working processes which they themselves think to be magic or witchcraft.
From Witchcraft Today therefore it shows that Gardner considered Wica to be a plurale tantum
Plurale tantum
A plurale tantum is a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant for referring to a single object...
that referred to the Witches collectively. However, in an interview with one reporter for the Daily Dispatch in 1954, Gardner supposedly told him that "there are man and woman witches. Each is called a wica." In this manner therefore it seems that the term Wica was used be Gardner to apply to individual Witches (i.e. "a wica") as well as to the community as a whole (i.e. "the Wica").
In his later book The Meaning of Witchcraft
The Meaning of Witchcraft
The Meaning of Witchcraft is a non-fiction book written by Gerald Gardner, the, known to many in the modern sense as the "Father of Wicca", based around his experiences with the religion of Wicca and the New Forest Coven...
(1959) Gardner stated that he first heard the term Wica whilst being initiated into the New Forest coven
New Forest coven
The New Forest coven were a group of Neopagan witches or Wiccans who allegedly met around the area of the New Forest in southern England during the 1930s and 1940s...
in September 1939, stating that "I realised I had stumbled on something interesting; but 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." This account was repeated in his biography, Gerald Gardner: Witch (1960), written by Idries Shah
Idries Shah
Idries Shah , also known as Idris Shah, né Sayed Idries el-Hashimi , was an author and teacher in the Sufi tradition who wrote over three dozen critically acclaimed books on topics ranging from psychology and spirituality to travelogues and culture studies.Born in India, the descendant of a...
but attributed to Jack L. Bracelin
Jack L. Bracelin
Jack L. Bracelin was an influential figure in the early history of the neopagan religion of Wicca, being a High Priest of Gardnerian Wicca who had been inititated into the craft by Doreen Valiente in 1956 and had been a member of the Bricket Wood coven....
, in which he is quoted as saying that "it was halfway through when the word Wica was first mentioned; and I knew that that which I had thought burnt out hundreds of years ago still survived." In The Meaning of Witchcraft, Gardner noted the term Wicas resemblance to the Old English word wicca (ˈwɪtʃɑ), which in the Anglo-Saxon
Anglo-Saxons
Anglo-Saxon is a term used by historians to designate the Germanic tribes who invaded and settled the south and east of Great Britain beginning in the early 5th century AD, and the period from their creation of the English nation to the Norman conquest. The Anglo-Saxon Era denotes the period of...
period meant a male sorcerer and provided the basis for the modern English
Modern English
Modern English is the form of the English language spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England, completed in roughly 1550.Despite some differences in vocabulary, texts from the early 17th century, such as the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible, are considered to be in Modern...
witch, stating that "It is a curious fact that when the witches became English-speaking they adopted their Saxon name 'Wica'."
Wica became an accepted term amongst the early Gardnerians, as Gardner's followers and initiates became known.
For instance, Patricia
Patricia Crowther (Wiccan)
Patricia Crowther is considered influential in the early promotion of the Wicca religion. She was born in Sheffield as Patricia Dawson....
and Arnold Crowther
Arnold Crowther
Arnold Crowther was a skilled stage magician, ventriloquist, and puppeteer, and was married to Patricia Crowther. He was born as one of a pair of fraternal twins...
used the term in their work The Witches Speak (1959) when they wrote that "[T]he Red Queen told Alice
Alice (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)
Alice is a fictional character in the literary classic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There. She is a young girl from Victorian-era Britain.-Development:...
that she made words mean what wanted them to mean. She might very well have been talking about witchcraft, for today it is used to describe anything that one wishes to use it for. From the simple meaning "the craft of the Wica," it is used in connection with Black Magic
Black magic
Black magic is the type of magic that draws on assumed malevolent powers or is used with the intention to kill, steal, injure, cause misfortune or destruction, or for personal gain without regard to harmful consequences. As a term, "black magic" is normally used by those that do not approve of its...
, Satanism
Satanism
Satanism is a group of religions that is composed of a diverse number of ideological and philosophical beliefs and social phenomena. Their shared feature include symbolic association with, admiration for the character of, and even veneration of Satan or similar rebellious, promethean, and...
, Black Mass
Black Mass
A Black Mass is a ceremony supposedly celebrated during the Witches' Sabbath, which was a sacrilegious parody of the Catholic Mass. Its main objective was the profanation of the host, although there is no agreement among authors on how hosts were obtained or profaned; the most common idea is that...
es..." Another Gardnerian to use the term was Raymond Buckland
Raymond Buckland
Raymond Buckland , whose craft name is Robat, is an English American writer on the subject of Wicca and the occult, and a significant figure in the history of Wicca, of which he is a High Priest in both the Gardnerian and Seax traditions.According to his written works, primarily Witchcraft from the...
in Witchcraft - the Religion (1966), when he stated that "Today more and more people are turning to the Wica, finding the answer to their religious needs."
Charles Cardell's Wiccen
Charles CardellCharles Cardell
Charles Cardell was an English Wiccan who propagated his own tradition of the Craft, which was distinct from that of Gerald Gardner. Cardell's tradition of Wicca was based around a form of the Horned God known as Atho, and worked with a coven that met in the grounds of his estate in Surrey. His...
was a Witch who led a rival tradition to Gardner's in England during the 1950s. After their falling out in 1958, Cardell set out to discredit him, and eventually published many of the then-secret Gardnerian rituals in 1964. Cardell used the term "Wiccen" to refer not just to members of his tradition, but to all followers of the Craft, placing an advert in Light magazine in 1958 asking all genuine "Wiccens" to get in contact with him. Several years later, when Cardell took the Evening News to court for publishing an account of his coven's rituals, he used the defence that he had never really believed in Witchcraft at all, but had only been pretending to do so in order to infiltrate the Gardnerians, which he claimed were a dangerous cult. As a part of this, the woman who claimed to be his sister, Mary Cardell, told the court that it had been Charles who himself had invented the term "Wiccen".
The researcher Melissa Seims, herself a Gardnerian initiate, believed it likely that Cardell himself had also used the term "Wicca", though in what context she did not elaborate on. This was because Margaret Bruce, a friend of Gardner's, wrote him a short poem about the Cardells and their tradition which stated:
- 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'
- Do not realise this Quicca.
Popular usage
The spelling Wicca is now used almost exclusively, Seax-WicaSeax-Wica
Seax-Wica is a tradition, or denomination, of the neopagan religion of Wicca which is largely inspired by the iconography of the historical Anglo-Saxon paganism, though, unlike Theodism, it is not a reconstruction of the early mediaeval religion itself....
being the only major use of the four-letter spelling. The first published appearance of the spelling Wicca is in June John's 1969 book King of the Witches: The World of Alex Sanders. The word's first appearance within the title of a book was in Wicca: The Ancient Way published in 1981. The earliest evidence of the common adjectival form "Wiccan", also used as a noun, dates from the 1970s.