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 [email protected] 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, capital- ized, 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.

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