Any of you bitches wanna ride my magic broomstick?
Guys, I am absolutely fascinated by this phenomenon of modern witchcraft religion. It seems that Christian hysteria and later anti-clerical fantasizing has literally memed Wicca into existence. The witch trials over 16th and 17th centuries in Europe and the American colonies were in my opinion a wave of moral panic at a time of famine, plague, depopulation, and diminishing power of the Western Church. The problem is compounded by our information about Early Modern witchcraft coming exclusively from Christian sources and folk tales.
But the era of the witch trials was promptly followed by an era of Enlightenment with a profoundly anti-clerical ideals. The French Revolution did away with the Catholic Church as an agent of the Ancien Régime. Some people like Jules Michelet thought witchcraft was a rebellion of the lower classes against the Church and feudalism. It apparently was a folk religion based on a belief in fairies. Personally, I am not sure Medieval or Early Modern peasantry had it in them to organize any religion or make it widespread. Ed Dutton mentions that these were often maladaptive women, who lived cast out of the mainstream society and practiced healing, abortions and other medical services to survive. But Michelet offered one of the first account sympathetic to witchcraft even though it was largely BS.
Another author was Matilda Joslyn Gage, a first wave feminist, who believed in matriarchal prehistory, and she claimed the witches were part of a Great Mother cult that is very ancient. This fascination with organized religion that reproduces itself over generations is very much Christian inspired. The Jewish tradition of holy books is what perpetuates a tradition. Most mystery schools of antiquity did not leave us with any written tradition. Therefore it is hard to believe that there ever was a paralel pagan religion.
Charles Leland went to Italy, and wrote about a purported tradition worshipping Diana and Lucifer. The modern witchcraft tradition pretty much combines feminism with mysticism and the worship of two gods. A horned god male and a moon goddess female. Diana was the goddess of the hunt and protector of nature, she is also associated with magic, Luna is her celestial representation. The Wicca is often conflated with feminist and environmentalist ideas.
The witch-cult entered respectable academic ground when Egyptologist Margaret Murray presented her theory in 1920s. She even wrote an entry in Encyclopædia Britannica on witchcraft. And her theory, now discredited served as a massive inspiration in 1950s to Gerald Gardner, a wealthy member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, an organization run by Aleister Crowley. Gardner took the idea of a witch-cult and married to it ideas from freemasonry and Western mysticism. This is how Wicca was born. Some say it was a way to get this old man, who was also into nudism, some fresh punani.
And it is funny how quickly this LARP was adopted by modern females, this is totally a Christianity story. Persecution, religious codification, diffusion…
Insomniac Resurrected 