A Study in Etymology, History, and Pagan Politics

[The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010) 185-207] ISSN 1528-0268 (Print) doi: 10.1558/pome.v12i2.184 ISSN 1743-1735 (Online)

The Meaning of “Wicca”: A Study in Etymology, History, and Pagan Politics

Ethan Doyle White

Abstract

This essay provides the first comprehensive examination of how the term “Wicca”—used in reference to the modern religion of Pagan Witchcraft —has been utilised throughout the faith’s history. Examining its anteced- ents, including the Old English “wicca” and the early Gardnerian “Wica”, the author looks at the many definitions that the term has seen over the last seventy years, and comes to conclusions that provide a new interpre- tation of not only how the term has been used in the Pagan community of the past and the present, but also how it can most effectively be used in the future.

According to the online Oxford Dictionary, the word “Wicca” refers to “the religious cult of modern witchcraft, especially an initiatory tradition founded in England in the mid 20th century and claiming its origins in pre-Christian pagan religions.” A similar definition is offered by Rose- mary Ellen Guiley in her encyclopaedia of witchcraft when she states that “Wicca” is the “alternate, and sometimes preferred, name for the religion of contemporary Witchcraft.”1 Whilst these are the general definitions of the term that I suspect would likely be agreed upon by the majority of Pagans, occultists, and indeed scholars of new religious movements around the world today, from both a historical and a contemporary per- spective, they are massive oversimplifications of what is in fact an area of conjecture and fierce debate. The Pagan Witchcraft movement—and I here use Witchcraft, capitalized, to denote the modern religious phenomenon—is today the largest and most influential form of contemporary Paganism, with what is likely hundreds of thousands of followers around the world. As with any religion, there has been a great deal of disagreement and infighting over a wide range of issues within its ranks, and this is perhaps most evident

1. Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft & Wicca (third edition), (New York: Checkmark Books, 2008), 371.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield S3 8AF 186 The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010) regarding the issue of how the term “Wicca,” along with related terms such as “Wica” and “the Wicca,” can and should be used. In this study, I plan to examine the origins and etymology of the word, and the historical context in which it developed, in order to better understand how it has been used and by whom since the 1950s. Despite the large amount of work that has been undertaken by a number of academics and independent researchers into the history of the Pagan Witchcraft movement, no full examination of the development of the term “Wicca” has ever before been published. Nonetheless, two preliminary studies of the subject have already been made: the first of these was an examination of the usage of the term “Wicca” within the United States by Pagan scholar Chas S. Clifton, which was published in his 2006 book Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America.2 The second was made by Melissa Seims, a British Gardnerian who published her findings in a 2008 article entitled “Wica or Wicca? Politics and the Power of Words.” In this article, first published in one of Britain’s best known Craft magazines, The Cauldron, and later made available through her personal website, she identified the usage of the word “Wica” (spelt with one c and distinct from the contemporary word “Wicca”) within early Gardnerianism and also explored the use of the word “Wiccen” by another early Pagan Witch, Charles Cardell.3 Whilst Clifton and Seims’s works were pioneering, I take issue with some of their assumptions and conclusions, and in this article I attempt to go beyond such preliminary explorations of the subject by examining the evolution and development of the term throughout the twentieth century.

The Anglo-Saxon “Wicca” Before I examine the origins of the word “Wicca” and the context in which it emerged in twentieth-century England, I believe it is necessary to turn back the clock ten centuries, to the Early Mediaeval period, when a word spelled “wicca” was utilized by the Anglo-Saxons, the speakers of Old English. Such a word, which was actually pronounced witch-a, referred to practitioners of sorcery, whilst their practices were themselves known as “wiccecraeft” or “wiccedom,”both of which would be the equivalents of the modern words “witchcraft” or “witchery.”4 This Anglo-Saxon sorcery was not a religion in itself, but a system of folk

2. Chas S. Clifton, Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (Lanham, Maryland: AltaMira Press, 2006.), 88-91. 3. Melissa Seims, “Wica or Wicca? Politics and the Power of Words,” The Cauldron 129, August 2008, http://www.thewica.co.uk/wica_or_wicca.htm. 4. Bill Griffiths, Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic (Hockwold-cum-Wilton, Norfolk: Anglo-Saxon Books, 1996), 95.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 Doyle White The Meaning of “Wicca” 187 magical charms and spells that had been used by both Pagans and Chris- tians, some of which have survived in written records for us today. What such evidence therefore makes clear is that the Old English term “wicca” and the Modern English term “Wicca”—separated by case distinction, by pronunciation, and by a millennium in between their usage—are fundamentally and indisputably two distinct words with very different meanings. Nonetheless, this does not rule out the possibil- ity, and indeed the likelihood, that the modern term “Wicca” was influenced, or even based upon, the Early Mediaeval “wicca.” The fact that both related to forms of magical praxes, albeit ones that were radically different to one another, makes it seem likely that the modern term was heavily influenced by its historical counterpart. It comes as little surprise that modern Pagan Witches would choose to adopt a historical term such as “wicca,” for like almost all contemporary Pagan faiths, theirs is one that draws heavily (in terms of iconography and inspiration, if not actual belief and praxes), from the historical polytheistic peoples of history. Gerald Gardner and other early Pagan Witches firmly associated their Craft with the ancient British Pagans, believing there to be a direct connection between the two via the Witch Cult, and by re-adopting the term “wicca” in some form, they would have been cementing such a connection, at least in their own eyes.

Gerald Gardner and “the Wica” Turning our attention to Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, we see the religion of Pagan Witchcraft beginning to emerge. From the 1930s through to the 1960s, there is evidence of a variety of different occult groups popping up around England, all describing themselves, or being described by others, as Witches, and following a form of magical Pagan religion. It was the “Father of Wicca,” Gerald Gardner, who provided the earliest account of such a group, making the claim (during the 1950s) that in the year 1939 he had been initiated into the New Forest coven. Although the definitive existence of this group has never been proved outright, the researcher Philip Heselton has put forward a compelling yet circumstantial case for its existence,5 and I am inclined to believe that it did exist in some form, although did not probably predate the 1930s. During the following decades, further covens apparently emerged in other parts of the country, including Cheshire, Cumbria, Norfolk, Slough, and the South Downs, all of which supposedly had origins independent from those of the New Forest coven or the Gardnerian tradition that it

5. Philip Heselton, Wiccan Roots: Gerald Gardner and the Modern Witchcraft Revival (Chieveley, Berkshire: Capall Bann, 2000).

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 188 The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010) subsequently spawned, providing evidence for what could be termed a “multiple origins theory” for Pagan Witchcraft. Contrary to a claim that is often used in the Pagan and occult commu- nities today, Gerald Gardner, the founder of Gardnerian Witchcraft and the public face of the movement during the late 1950s and early1960s, did not refer to his tradition of the Craft as “Wicca,” and there is in fact no recorded instance of him ever using the word. Instead, he referred to his faith as “the Craft of the Wise,” ”witchcraft,” and “the witch cult,” the latter of which was likely taken from the title of Egyptologist Marga- ret Murray’s seminal proto-Wiccan text The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921). Alongside these names for the Pagan Craft as a faith, there is ample evidence that Gardner referred to its adherents in a plural sense as “the Wica” (note the single c), stating in the tenth chapter of his book Witchcraft Today (1954) that

They are the people who call themselves the Wica, the “wise people”, who practise the age-old rites.6

Similarly, in Gerald Gardner: Witch (1960), the biography written by Gardner’s friend, the Sufi mystic Idries Shah, the term “Wica” is also widely used in reference to the Pagan Witches as a collective entity, and from this evidence it seems clear that it was this definition that Gardner stuck to. Nonetheless, there is a singular piece of evidence implying that Gardner also referred to individual Pagan Witches themselves as each being a “Wica,”with Arnold Field, a reporter from the Manx newspa- per The Daily Dispatch, stating that upon meeting Gardner in 1954, the elderly Witch “explained there are man and woman witches. Each is called a wica.”7 The reporter was not actually directly quoting Gardner here, and it is perfectly possible that he simply misunderstood what Gardner was telling him; he had, after all, also misspelled the word “Wica” by not capitalizing it. It is evident that Gardner used the term “Wica” with a very specific spelling to refer to the members of the Pagan Witchcraft religion (and not just his own tradition) as a group, and perhaps also individually, and believed that the word had been used by the faith’s members since the Early Mediaeval period (in his 1959 book The Meaning of Witch- craft he stated that “It is a curious fact that when the [Pagan] witches became English-speaking they adopted their Saxon name ‘Wica.’”)8

6. Gerald Gardner, Witchcraft Today (London: Rider, 1954), 102. 7. Arnold Field, “Yes I Am A Witch,” The Daily Dispatch (Isle of Man), 5 August 1954. 8. Gerald Gardner, The Meaning of Witchcraft (London: Aquarian, 1971 [1959]), 96.

This quote implies that he must have therefore associated his “Wica” with the Old English “wicca,”and he certainly appeared to believe, albeit incorrectly, that the Craft religion dated back to at least this period. From his own personal accounts, it seems that he got this term “Wica” from the New Forest coven who had initiated him in Septem- ber 1939. For example, in The Meaning of Witchcraft, he recounted that:

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.9

In Gerald Gardner: Witch, he offered a similar account of his initiation, remarking that

It was halfway through when the word Wica was first mentioned: “and I then knew that that which I had thought burnt out hundreds of years ago still survived.”10

The fact that Gardner chose to spell this as “Wica,”using a single c, should not be taken to mean that the coven necessarily spelt it the same way (that is if they ever wrote it down at all, or that it even existed). From his account, it seems that he had heard rather than read the word in the midst of his initiatory rite, and suffering from a poor grasp of spelling, punctuation, and grammar, something caused by the fact that he was self-educated and possibly also influenced by dyslexia; he would quite likely have simply spelt it phonetically as “Wica.” The possibil- ity must therefore be noted that the New Forest coven could actually have used the spelling “wicca,” assimilated from reading about historical witchcraft and magic (Gardner stated that they “had carefully read many books on the subject” of the occult),11 although in what context we cannot be sure. Like almost everything about this enigmatic coven, we can only speculate based upon Gardner’s own writings, and these do not give us much to go on. The term “Wica” was subsequently adopted by many of the early Gardnerians who were initiated into his tradition, and who themselves left further written evidence of it. In 1963, Arnold Crowther, who was the high priest of a coven in Sheffield, sent a letter to Gardner in which he referred, presumably humorously, to “The Wica Detective Agency.”12 He also referred to Pagan Witchcraft as the “Craft of the Wica” in his 1965 book The Witches Speak, co-written with his wife, the high priestess

9. Gardner, Meaning of Witchcraft, 11 10. Jack Bracelin, Gerald Gardner: Witch (London: Octagon Press, 1960), 165. 11. Bracelin, Gerald Gardner: Witch, 164-65. 12. Letter from Arnold Crowther to Gardner. Owned by Richard and Tamara James of the Wiccan Church of Canada. Cited in Seims, “Wica or Wicca?”.

Patricia Crowther.13 Similar uses can also be seen in the writings of other early Gardnerians like Raymond Buckland, Monique and Scotty Wilson, and in the oral use of it by Charles Clark.14 What is clearly illustrated by such evidence is that despite any claims to the contrary made by current Pagans, there is no evidence that the early Gardnerians made use of the term “Wicca” to refer to either their tradition or to Pagan Witchcraft in general, and that instead they used “Wica” to refer to the community of Pagan Witches.

Charles Cardell and the “Wiccens” So if it was not Gerald Gardner or the early Gardnerians who developed the term “Wicca” to refer to the faith, then who was it? Gardnerian initiate and researcher Melissa Seims believed that the man responsible may well have been one of Gardner’s rivals in the Pagan Witchcraft movement of the 1950s, a psychologist and stage conjuror known as Charles Cardell. According to press reports, Cardell controlled his own coven from his estate in the village of Charlwood, Surrey, and also ran a company called Dumblecott Magick Productions, through which he sold potions as well as his own newsletter. He was active in the British esoteric movement, being involved with Spiritualism as well as Pagan Witchcraft, and was in contact with Gerald Gardner until they had a falling out in 1958, after which Cardell set about to thoroughly discredit him and his tradition, privately publishing much of the then-secret Gard- nerian Book of Shadows following Gardner’s death in 1964. In 1958, Charles Cardell wrote an article for Light magazine, the published journal of the College of Psychic Science, which he titled “The Craft of the Wiccens,” and in which he invited all “Wiccens,” thereby referring to Pagan Witches, to get in contact with him.15 It therefore appears that Cardell was responsible for the propagation, and quite possibly the invention, of the term “Wiccen” (as opposed to the now more com- monly used, but presumably almost phonetically identical, “Wiccan”) in reference to the followers of the Pagan Witchcraft movement as a whole, but whether he referred to the Pagan Craft itself as “Wicca” is another matter. Seims believed that this was a likelihood because of a piece of evidence that she unearthed in the archives of the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall. In a letter dated 23 February 1960,

13. Arnold Crowther and Patricia Crowther, The Witches Speak, (Douglas, Isle of Man: Athol Publications, 1965), 39. 14. Raymond Buckland, Witchcraft—the Religion, (Brentwood, New York: The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick, 1966), 20; Seims, “Wica or Wicca?”. 15. Aidan A. Kelly, Inventing Witchcraft: A Case Study in the Creation of a New Reli- gion, (Loughborough, Leicestershire: Thoth Publications, 2007), 87.

Margaret Bruce, the owner of a mail-order business dealing in occult goods, consoled Gardner following Cardell’s increasingly hostile actions against him and included a short poem summarising the situation:

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’ Don’t realise this Quicca.16

Seims believed that this usage of “Wicca” was explicitly in reference to the Cardellian tradition, and that it therefore indicated “that this spelling, along with “Wiccen,” was used by Cardell.”17 I would, however, point out that this is not the only explanation, and it could be that Bruce was instead referring to “the Wicca” as a community of Pagan Witches (it would therefore be a misspelling of Gardner’s “the Wica”), and in this manner she would actually not be commenting solely on the bad behav- iour of the Cardellians but on how the various traditions of Pagan Witch- craft were fighting amongst one another, something that she clearly disapproved of. Either way, the fact that this spelling only appears in a private letter and not in any published works of the period indicates that such terminology was apparently not widespread in the Craft at the time. Nonetheless, Seims also identified another piece of evidence that potentially indicated the Cardellian usage of “Wicca”: this was an advertisement published in Fate magazine in 1962, in which a Cardiff-based tradition known as “Wicca—Dianic and Aradian” was mentioned. Seims connected this to the Cardells for the reason that “Mary Cardell was originally from Wales and Diana is the main Goddess mentioned in the Atho material which appears to have originated with Cardell.”18 I would, however, challenge this as being too vague a connection between the Cardells and this advertisement, noting that many of the early Pagan Witchcraft groups would have naturally adopted the names Diana and Aradia for their deities, these being the two witch goddesses in Charles Leland’s alleged account of a Tuscan witchcraft religion, Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899). This advertisement is, however, interesting in

16. Letter from Margaret Bruce to Gardner. Held in the Museum of Witchcraft, Boscastle. Cited in Seims, “Wica or Wicca?”. 17. Seims, “Wica or Wicca?”. 18. Seims, “Wica or Wicca?”.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 192 The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010) that it appears to be the earliest known published reference to “Wicca” in the context of the Pagan Witchcraft religion, at least that which is known to the author. It is of note on a sideline here that Robert Cochrane, another of Gard- ner’s rivals who propagated a form of religious Witchcraft during the early sixties (whether it was Pagan or Luciferian-Gnostic in nature is a matter of disagreement amongst his current followers), referred to “the illusionary world of Ye Olde English Wiccen” in a 1964 article of his published in Pentagram, the newsletter of the Witchcraft Research Association.19 It appears here, however, that Cochrane was not making any claim to the term “Wiccen” for his own followers but was merely ridiculing those Witches, namely the Gardnerians but also perhaps the Cardellians, who used mock-archaic language in their rituals. He certainly knew of Cardell and disliked him and his tradition, and it may be for this reason that he was mockingly using their term.20 It is of further note that the following year, when the journalist Justine Glass published Witchcraft, The Sixth Sense—and Us, she made no mention of the Craft being referred to as “Wicca.” She had been aided in her research for the work by the likes of Cochrane, Doreen Valiente, and Patricia Crowther, and surely if any of them had been aware of it, then it would most likely have been included in Glass’s text. She had, however—on the very first page no less—made note of the fact that the word “witch” had originated in the Anglo-Saxon “wicca.”21 Glass was not the only writer on the subject of Pagan Witchcraft to highlight this. Gardner, in The Meaning of Witchcraft, mentioned the fact a total of five times, something that Melissa Seims believed was likely to be down to the influence of his high priestess Doreen Valiente, who aided him in the writing of the work, and who herself was very interested in the etymology of the word.22 Valiente also made note of it on the very first page of her Where Witchcraft Lives (1962), however, this book never achieved widespread distribution.23 This is of potential importance because it dis- plays that the Old English “wicca” was a word that was already being used in most of the same published sources that discussed contemporary Pagan Witchcraft. It seems likely that many Witches would have had

19. Robert Cochrane, “The Craft Today,” Pentagram 2, November 1964. 20. Robert Cochrane, The Robert Cochrane Letters: An Insight into Modern Traditional Witchcraft, (Milverton, Somerset: Capall Bann, 2002), 127. 21. Justine Glass, Witchcraft, the Sixth Sense—and Us (London: Neville Spearman, 1965). 22. Seims, “Wica or Wicca?”. 23. Doreen Valiente, Where Witchcraft Lives, (The Centre for Pagan Studies, 2010 [1962]), 1.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 Doyle White The Meaning of “Wicca” 193 access to these books, which at the time were three of only four works to be published on the subject, and it would not have been a large step for some of them to adapt the Old English “wicca,”which they believed to be an ancient word for “witch,” into the Modern English “Wicca,” a term for their newly burgeoning faith.

”Wicca,” John Score, Gavin Frost, and the Alexandrians In the penultimate issue of the Pentagram newsletter, published in December 1965, a small column was included that examined Hallow- een and its connection to the Craft. Whilst the writer’s name was not included, it was presumably produced by Gerard Noel, Doreen Valiente, or one of the other figures involved in the production of the paper. What is important about this particular piece was that within it, “the Craft of the Wiccan” was mentioned, apparently referring to the entire Pagan Witchcraft religion, with this providing another early printed example of the term.24 Following the collapse of Pentagram, a group of British Gard- nerians began publication of a newsletter devoted to the Pagan Craft in July 1968, which they titled The Wiccan. Edited by the Dorset-based high priest John Score, who had been initiated only the previous year by Madge Worthington, it provides us with good evidence that by this period in time, the term “Wiccan” was being used amongst the Gard- nerian community, and that “Wicca” was quite presumably being used as well. Indeed, one Welshman, Gavin Frost, apparently came upon it around this time, for when he and his wife, Yvonne, moved to the United States soon after, they founded a teaching group known as the Church of Wicca in 1968, through which they propagated their own unusually monotheistic tradition.25 The term “Wicca” had arrived. Around the same time, “Wicca” was also certainly being used by adherents of a new tradition that had only just emerged in Britain, Alexandri- anism, a Craft variant developed by the third degree Gardnerian initiate Alex Sanders, which he attempted to pass off as a hereditary form of Pagan Witchcraft. Melissa Seims noted that the word “Wicca” was used in King of the Witches: The World of Alex Sanders (1969), an overly positive biography written of Sanders by the journalist June Johns. Despite this, the only actual reference to “Wicca” found in the book is in the glossary, where it is described as an “ancient word for witchcraft.” It is clear then that here Johns is simply referring to the Old English word “wicca,”

24. “Hallowe’en,” Pentagram 5, December 1965, 19. 25. Guiley, Encyclopedia, 61.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010 194 The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010) which due to its inclusion in a glossary has been capitalized.26 Following on from the success of King of the Witches, the publisher Peter Davies was interested in releasing another book on the subject of the Craft, and so Sanders approached another sympathetic journalist, Stewart Farrar, to write a work that would examine the particular beliefs and practices of the Alexandrian tradition. Farrar soon became an Alex- andrian initiate and used what he had learned from this in the writing of What Witches Do: A Modern Coven Revealed, published in 1971. In this work, Farrar clearly used the term “Wicca” to refer to Pagan Witchcraft in its totality, referring to it as “the witches’ name for their Craft,” thereby implying that at this period Alex Sanders and his coven, which was the only group that Farrar was actually associated with, referred to their faith as “Wicca.” Following on from this, Farrar also stated that “Wicca is divided, sometimes bitterly, into more than one school of thought,” and that as such there were “four sects: Hereditary, Traditional, Gardnerian and Alexandrian.”27 This work, which was one of the earliest published texts to deal with the subject of modern Pagan Witchcraft, is therefore probably the earliest published example of the term “Wicca” being used in a book at all, and here it is clearly being used in reference to the Pagan Witchcraft religion as a whole. Further evidence of how “Wicca” was utilized amongst the early Alexandrians can be found in the various lectures that Sanders distrib- uted amongst his initiates circa 1970, and which were collected together and published as The Alex Sanders Lectures in 1984. In the first of these lectures, entitled “The Wicca and the Horned God,” Sanders, or at least one of his disciples, refers incorrectly to “Wicca” as being the Anglo- Saxon word for “the craft of the Wise,” and also refers to “the Wicca” as the name of the Pagan Witchcraft religion, presumably in its entirety. In this sense it was likely a spelling confusion based upon the Gardnerian use of “the Wica” (which Sanders, being a Gardnerian third-degree initiate, would have almost certainly encountered) with “wicca,” the Old English word pertaining to witchcraft. However, in other parts of the lectures, the term “Wicca” is used without the appendage of “the” to refer to the religion, thereby fitting with its contemporary usage by Farrar.28 There is so much literature regarding Pagan Witchcraft, both published and unpublished, that dates from the 1960s and 1970s, that it would be a near-impossible task to collate and study it all to discover

26. June Johns, King of the Witches: The World of Alex Sanders, (London: Peter Davies, 1969). 27. Stewart Farrar, What Witches Do: A Modern Coven Revealed, (London: Peter Davies, 1971), 04-06. 28. Alex Sanders, The Alex Sanders Lectures. (New York: Magickal Childe Publish- ing, 1984).