Wicca

INTRODUCTION

Wicca is an eclectic faith that focuses on divinities, goddesses and worship of nature. A popular Wiccan writer named Gary Cantrell says that Wicca is based primarily on "harmony with nature and all aspects of god and goddess theology. The practice of Wicca involves the control of nature done through various rituals to gain prestige, power, admiration or other things they want.

Its origins date back to the ancient Celtic agricultural community. It is perceived as Neo-Pagan. There is no hierarchical structure of the clergy in Wicca. What exists are priestesses or priests who are equivalent to a leadership position within covens that contain witches The well-known variants of the Wicca belief are Alexandrian, 1734, Dianic, Celtic, Eclectic, Dicordian, Georgian and Val Gardena. The Wicca is also recognized as its own religion within the armed forces of several countries.

One of the standard ways of the Wicca creed is the teaching of karma and the incarnation. The purpose of reincarnation is to teach the reincarnated individual the lessons through the many lives he will lead. This process of reincarnation is duplicated over multiple periods of life until the spirit is strengthened. This enhancement is characterized by a fusion of the spirit with the creator. The spirits are returned to whoever that Wiccan coven considers a goddess or God. Karma, which governs the law of cause and effect, neither rewards nor punishes.

Wicca does not assert itself as the only way, but affirms that all faith-based religions are legitimate for the individuals who use them. It welcomes the truth that all forms of life are precious, including animal, plant and human".

Typically, Wiccans refuse to recognize the existence of the devil (they do not worship Lucifer/Satan). They do not have group sex or any vulgar manifestation of sexual activity in their rituals, do not have sex with animals and do not make blood sacrifices. In Wicca, it is forbidden to cast spells to harm people. They recognize the divinity of nature and aim to have a symbiotic relationship with nature.

Wiccans follow two main rules. One of these rules is the Wiccan Creed which specifies that you can do whatever you want as long as you do not harm anyone in the process. The second rule states that any kind of action, good or bad, that you do will triple.

According to the Wiccan belief, an all-encompassing life force called The All or The One has brought out the feminine and masculine aspects of life in this world. The Saint, goddess or goddess, depends on the individual with whom you are conversing, may have various names. References to more deities than other beliefs: Buddhism, Sumerian, Egyptian, Christian, Greek, Hindu, etc. The Wicca does not give much importance to naming the perception that a Wiccan has of God.

A Wiccan may also consider his divinity as conscious of himself, while another Wiccan may not. It all depends on a Wiccan's perception of what works best. The Wiccan faith is based solely on self-design. The Wicca recognizes the fact that God can show distinctive traits in various ways to a group of different individuals. Therefore, Wiccans may have different ideas of God.

Wicca is attractive to individuals who do not covet or embrace absolute truths. A person has the freedom to discover his or her own individual path in Wicca.

It should be clear that Wicca is a faith of individual preference. This basically means that you are free to create, formulate and develop a religion that meets your personal desires and passions. Moreover, in Wicca you can try to manipulate your surroundings and other men and women using spells and spells. This mixture of establishing a belief that suits your individual preferences and try to influence others is very attractive to many individuals.

CHAPTER 1 - History of Wicca

Most Wicca adherents (ancient Anglo-Saxon expression for sorcerer, male Wicce, witch, presented at the origins of the current - but in a philologically imaginative way - as ancient English version of witchcraft, witchcraft) define themselves as pagan, although not all pagans and neo-pagans consider themselves witches or adherents of Wicca. The relationship between neo-paganism and neo-witchcraft is related to a historiographical controversy, the so-called Murray heresy, and to the very origins of the movement called Wicca in England. A first controversy revolves around the theses of Margaret Alice Murray (1863-1963), Egyptologist by profession and historian of witchcraft for passion, who published since 1917 several writings on witches that culminated in 1931 with The God of Witches. Influenced by the research, in turn discussed, of the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903), Margaret Murray - who survived the controversy over her historiographical heresy and lived to the respectable age of one hundred - maintains that witchcraft is simply the old religion of pre-Christian Europe, which secretly survived persecution. The Inquisition tried and condemned it as Satanism, while it was rather a dualistic cult of a male and female principle of ancient origin. The witchcraft fought by the Inquisition was in essence, according to Margaret Murray, the authentic pagan religion. Convinced that medieval witchcraft had nothing to do with pagan pre-Christian religions, academic historians of witchcraft reacted violently to Margaret Murray's book, and many took advantage of the controversy to conclude that witchcraft never existed except in the imagination of the Inquisitors, who had invented witches and created their moral panic. Since the 1970s, however, the dominant trend in academic historiography has changed. Historians like Carlo Ginzburg, starting from specific examples, suggest an average way that does not accept neither Margaret Murray's thesis nor the counter-thesis that witchcraft is a mere creation of the Inquisitors. The Inquisition, Ginzburg and others argue, did not invent witchcraft: elements derived from a folkloric culture - some ancient, some more recent - had an autonomous existence, which would have continued even without the inquisitors' trials. The historiographic problem is, if anything, that of discerning this folkloric nucleus, which - because of the interaction with the elements that came from the Inquisitors' own culture - it is difficult for contemporary historians to find in the trial papers. The same elements that more precisely recall pre-Christian and pagan traditions could, according to Ginzburg, come from the Inquisitors who (unlike the inquisitors) were certainly endowed with a good classical culture. It is wiser to conclude, according to these historians, that the authentic core of medieval and proto-modern witchcraft includes popular ecstatic experiences, which however remain very different from those of the pagan religion as it existed before Christianity.

In the 1990s other historians, mainly English (Lyndal Roper, Robin Briggs, James Sharpe, Diane Purkiss, Stuart Clark), adopted a further different position and some claimed that witchcraft trials - which were smaller in number than previous historians had believed - arose from below, from accusations and popular distrust of marginal and suspect figures (mainly female, but also male), which the authorities tried to channel and control. These marginal figures could have different forms of behaviour considered antisocial, but they did not practice any kind - not even, except in rare and local cases, folkloric - of alternative or pre-Christian religiosity. The creators of the Wicca use, essentially, the Murray heresy. If, in fact, the pagan religion had had a secret continuation in witchcraft, it was not incredible that - always in secret - it had continued to the present day and authentic heirs could still be found today. The founder of the Wicca - not by all Wicca today recognized as such - is Gerald Brosseau Gardner (1884-1964). He was born in Great Crosby, English Lancashire, on June 13, 1884 into a wealthy family. He did not continue his university studies but, fascinated by the East, went to work for the British Civil Service in Malaysia. In 1936 he retired and retired to the New Forest area in Southern England. Already in the East he was interested in the local magic traditions and joined the theosophical society. In England he is so naturally welcomed by theosophical circles and is part of a Rosicrucian Fraternity of the New Forest whose members are almost all theosophists. Later, Gardner gave importance to his alleged frequentation of a well-known figure in the New Forest, Dorothy Clutterbuck Fordham (1880-1951), claiming to have received from this old Dorothy a hereditary tradition of witchcraft continued in the area for centuries within some families. In a work published in 1999, The Triumph of the Moon, historian Ronald Hutton - who had access to Dorothy Clutterbuck's personal papers and diaries - definitively established that the lady of the New Forest, a pillar of the Conservative Party and the local Anglican Church, had no esoteric or theosophical interest. Gardner, who had probably met her, wanted - giving the name of a socially known (and deceased) personality - to create a false lead to hide the real origins of her ritual. Some believed that Gardner's true initiator was Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), and even accused him of having written the first rituals of the Wicca for Gardner, against payment. From Crowley's diaries, however, it can be deduced that Gardner visited him three times, for a few hours, only in 1947, the same year of Crowley's death: the old magician was now tired and sick, and could not have helped Gardner to create a ritual (which, after all, in embryonic form, the latter had already developed before 1947), even if he helped him by providing him with some books difficult to find. Gardner and some friends elaborated in the 1940s - based on the ideas of Margaret Murray and a variety of other sources - a ritual inspired by witchcraft, and began to practice it with people who were part of their theosophical circle in the New Forest.

Until 1951 witchcraft was illegal in England (the relevant law was repealed only in that year). Gardner publishes for the first-time references to a neo-witchcraft organization in the form of a novel in 1949, under the title High Magic's Aid. It was only after the legislative breakthrough of 1951 that Gardner was able to publish two theoretical works: Witchcraft Today in 1954, and The Meaning of Witchcraft in 1959. In these works - as well as in many conversations and interviews - Gardner, from the late 1940s until his death in 1964, insists that he did not invent Wicca, but that he came into contact with a New Forest group that dates back to the Middle Ages and that a tradition is passed down from father to son (and mother to daughter). Sometimes, Gardner refers to old Dorothy as a peasant witch; in fact, Dorothy Clutterbuck Fordham was actually called the old Dorothy, but she was a cultured and very rich Anglican lady, who - as we have seen - seems to have had nothing to do with witchcraft. There are different opinions on the reliability of Gardner's account. Margot Adler (1946-2014) and Aidan A. Kelly tend to maintain that Gardner's story is totally fantastic. Kelly, in particular, worked on Gardner's personal documents, which were given to a Museum of Witchcraft in the Isle of Man and then from there to the company Ripley's International, which manages for profit the various curiosity museums Riplay's Believe It or Not around the world. To the question whether in the first versions, of 1949 and 1953, of Gardner's magic notebooks and the Book of Shadows there were elements that did not come from known sources in the world of esoteric movements in the 1940s, Kelly answers negatively. Everything can be traced back to rituals and works by Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn, the Theosophical Society and Freemasonry, with occasional derivations from the classics of English literature and the works of Leland and Murray. The only addition concerns scourging, a bland ritual scourging, which Kelly attributes more to Gardner's sexual preferences than to a supposedly ancient tradition. Ronald Hutton basically accepts Kelly's thesis, with the only difference that he attributes the choice of scourging to the opportunity to find an easy method to provoke altered states of consciousness rather than to Gardner's allegedly unproven sado-masochistic tendencies. For her part, Doreen Valiente (1922-1999), Gardner's favorite pupil until his breakup in 1957, considered by many to be the mother of contemporary Wicca, matured several positions on this controversy during a long career in neo-regonery. In her most recent writings, Doreen Valiente reports that Gardner admitted to having copied parts of the ritual from Crowley and Leland, and confirms Kelly's claims about important revisions to the Book of Shadows made by Valiente herself between 1953 and 1957 to eliminate a series of Masonic and Crowleyan references. In controversy with Kelly, Doreen Valiente argues however that Gardner - having admitted a series of episodes of dishonourable episodes about his use of literary loans - had no reason to lie when he continued, until his death, to claim to have really come into contact with a coven of New Forest witchcraft of ancient origins. Crowley himself, moreover, has been attributed contact with a tradition of hereditary witchcraft that dates back to George Pickingill (1816-1909). The thesis, proposed by Bill Liddell in 1974 and repeated by many other authors, was dismantled by Hutton and others: Crowley has never been interested in modern or ancient witchcraft (except to criticize it as inferior magic); there is no documentary evidence of contacts between Crowley and Pickingill, nor between the latter (a farmer from Canewdon, Essex, who worked as a cunning man, or village folk magician, made famous in the 1960s by the studies of the folklorist Eric Maple) and cultured magical environments. Nor should it be forgotten that Gardner's eventual contact - unproven - with an older tradition of witchcraft, either directly or through Crowley, would in any case not lead back to pre-Christian paganism, unless we take Murray's theses literally as good, something that even his most benevolent critics are not willing to do today. It would be wrong, however, to believe that contemporary Wicca is a prisoner of debate about its origins. As Margot Adler writes, many of those participating in the neo-regonic revival accept the Old Universal Religion more as a metaphor than as a literal reality; for others, the question of origins is not important. An exponent of the Gardnerian Wicca, Ed Fitch, says: Today, of course, we all understand that it doesn't matter if your tradition is forty thousand years old or if it was created last week. If you have established the right contact with the Goddess or God in the subconscious, and with other such forces, then you have realized the important thing (Drawing Down the Moon, Beacon Press, Boston 19862, pp. 87-88). The world of Wicca (and of neo-witchcraft in general, since - especially outside the English-speaking world - not everyone accepts the Wicca label) is an unstable constellation of generally small groups that form, divide, meet at annual festivals, read the same newspapers (which in turn are often ephemeral) and frequent the same bookstores. There is no doubt, however, that these are - at least in the majority of cases - real movements, and not just an environment: names such as federation or even Church are often assumed, which clearly indicate the intention to organize themselves. From the doctrinal point of view, the emphasis on the value of polytheism as a ferment of freedom and rejection of hierarchies is linked to the ephemeral character of the majority of Wicca groups. It is equally true that witches and sorcerers generally feel part of the same movement, despite their differences. In this sense, it is perhaps less essential than many believe the distinction between various strands: Orthodox Gardnerians, hereditary groups (whose initiators question Gardner's account but claim to have found authentic witchcraft traditions in their family), alexandrians - derived from Alex Sanders (pseudonym of Orrell Alexander Carter, 1926-1988), who in turn claimed a family tradition that would be passed on to him by his grandmother -, dianists, eclectic. It is a movement - generally made up of cultured people of the upper middle class - that has made a considerable public relations effort in recent years to improve its image and distinguish itself from Satanism and Crowley Sexual Magic. While some groups have proposed to avoid the terms witches and witchcraft (preferring to speak less provocatively of paganism), the majority have no intention of changing their name. In the world, several tens of thousands of people are involved in this movement. The countries where the Wicca is strongest - the United States and England - are trying to overcome an initial phase in which the movement has defined itself above all by its being against Christianity, by taking a more proactive stance and even cautious experiences of dialogue with other religions, including Christian denominations. It is estimated that in the Anglo-Saxon area about one hundred and fifty thousand people participate in the movement, less than a third of whom have received formal initiation into a coven or coven. Much smaller is the presence - in the order of a few thousand, if not hundreds of people in each country - in continental Europe and Latin America. Wicca does not have a unitary international organization, nor - strictly speaking - national organizations. The main current (the one that is recognized in the word Wicca itself) accepts the principle of the Rede (if it doesn't harm anyone, do what you want, a law that according to Hutton, rather than being of ancient origin, was created by Gardner on the basis of Crowley's Law of Thelema, with the important corrective of the invitation not to harm anyone) and the Law of Three according to which both the good and the bad done to others return three times reciprocated. There is not even a unitary doctrine, and the reference to polytheism is interpreted in very different ways (just as different is the type of existence attributed to divinities). The rituals present important variations from group to group, although references to Gardner's original Book of Shadows pervade almost the entire movement. In recent years, increasing the difficulty of founding or joining a coven (an organization by its nature small and closed), there has been a real explosion of individual practitioners, who self-initiate through books or the Internet and do not join organized groups. They are also part of a movement that overwhelms the traditional distinctions between magic and religion: the Wicca proposes a magic that works and becomes, for the practitioner, a religion, about which the category of religion of nature" is the one that meets the greatest consensus among recent scholars. The movement remains essentially fluid and poorly organized, although it has found in the Internet a coordination tool particularly suited to its purposes.

History of Neopagan Religion in the Middle Ages

Wicca is a religion aimed at the communion of the practitioner with the Divine and with Nature.

It has its roots in ancient times, handed down orally by the first Celtic tribes and then consolidated as a true religion, starting from the dawn of the Middle Ages and spread mainly in Northern Europe. Unlike other religions, the Wicca provides a combination of spirituality and relationship with life. Its intent is to guide the human being to move his steps on the path of everyday life through the relationship with the Divine and, at the same time, to help him to develop an increasingly vibrant spirituality.

Contrary to many other religions, the Wicca does not have any particular dogmas or rigid codes of behaviour. What counts are the perceptions that the individual develops towards nature, the energies invisible to the eye and the relationship between him and the Divine in the first person, without intermediaries.

An it harm none, do what you will.

(An is an archaic word meaning if.)

This is the only rule that the Wicca imposes.

The practitioner can be solitary, therefore any witch or sorcerer (as the followers are called) who autonomously manages his rituals, or he can gather, if he identifies and desires, in a Coven, or a circle of people who together celebrate Wicca practices.

Gerald Gardner during a Wicca ritual

Because of the wide misinformation on the subject, and the bad reputation handed down for centuries, many believe that the Wicca has to do with satanic cults or deviant