be the religious and spiritual needs of many in the generations to come. However, the Craft could only fulfil this role if enough information was published for people to know about its existence and for the persistent to access it. Like all religious visionaries, Gerald found that his enthusiasm for new ideas did not always find favour with his elders. Dorothy Clutterbuck was not keen on publicity, but two years before her death Gerald managed to give out some information under the guise of a novel, High Magic’s Aid.10 This was published in 1949 under his Latin Witch name of Scire, To Know.
Old Dorothy’s death in 1951 coincided with the repeal in Britain of the Witchcraft Act. Gerald now felt free to publish a non-fiction work and in 1954 Witchcraft Today11 appeared, the first account of modern-day Wicca. Margaret Murray wrote the introduction. Within the Craft there has often been speculation that Margaret Murray was herself a Witch, but in any event she was keen to support Gerald Gardner’s book and wrote that he had shown that Witchcraft was descended from ancient rituals and that it had nothing to do with evil practices. It was:
… the sincere expression of that feeling towards God which is expressed perhaps more decorously, though not more sincerely, by modern Christianity in church services. But the processional dances of the drunken Bacchantes, the wild prancings round the Holy Sepulchre as recorded by Maundrell at the end of the seventeenth century, the jumping dance of the medieval Witches, the solemn zikr of the Egyptian peasant, the whirling of the dancing dervishes, all have their origin in the desire to be ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’, and to show by their actions that intense gratitude which the worshippers find themselves incapable of expressing in words.12
The religion of Wicca which emerged from Gerald Gardner’s books is a religion based on initiation into a Mystery tradition which practised rites based on the seasonal cycle, out of doors, often skyclad or in naturist fashion, using the Wise-craft of our ancestors and giving honour to the female Divine – the Goddess. Three major strands of belief and practice had merged: the Dionysian ecstatic and shamanistic practices of the Paganism of the woods and groves; the more Apollonian temple religions of later Paganism; and magic. In the twentieth century the word Witchcraft had come to mean not just a particular form of magic using incantations and spells, but a whole system of religious philosophy and belief. Wicca worked within groups called covens with three degrees of entry, but the degrees were marked by initiation rites which had been elaborated using concepts from the magical societies such as the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, who had themselves harked back to the rites of Isis and the Eleusian Mysteries when devising their ceremonies. The ancient idea of dancing in a circle to raise power was as old as the Stone Age and was a known Witch practice, but Witches did not traditionally use a magic circle cast with a sword. This concept had however merged into the Witchcraft tradition and circle dancing now took place in cast and consecrated circles with guardians at each of the four cardinal points. The use of magic and spells was still part of the tradition, but now these were set into a religious framework that stood halfway between the Apollonian and Dionysian forms of Paganism. The orgies that had appealed to our ancestors were not needed in an age which was moving towards greater sexual freedom in everyday life and where population control rather than fertility was the problem that faced society.
Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today was followed in 1959 by The Meaning of Witchcraft.13 On the premise that all publicity is good publicity, he decided to make himself available to the media. This resulted in the 1950s and 1960s in a spate of articles about Wicca that informed those whose religious and spiritual ideas were sympathetic of the continued existence of the Old Religion. Gradually people began to find their way to covens, not only those which Gerald was rapidly founding based on the New Forest tradition he had inherited, but also to other covens who were willing to accept outsiders.
Gardnerian Witches initiated by Gerald and his initiates have become one of the major branches of Wicca. Another major branch is the Alexandrian tradition whose members derive their initiation from Alex and Maxine Sanders via a Gardnerian initiatory line. After Gerald’s death in 1964, Alex took over the role of media Witch and successfully publicized the existence of the Craft, not only in England, but also elsewhere in Europe. The two traditions use more or less the same ritual material and have been steadily converging in recent years. The differences are more in ritual style and outlook than anything else. Loosely speaking, the Gardnerians are more Low Church and the Alexandrians more High Church. Alexandrian Witches tend to be more interested in ritual magic than in folk Paganism.
As well as Gardnerian and Alexandrian Craft, there are other traditions that have brought in outsiders. Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca are derived largely from one particular tradition, based in the New Forest area of the South of England; although this has been cross-fertilized by contact with other British traditions. Another important branch of the Craft springs from the Witch known as Robert Cochrane who claimed to have been initiated into a hereditary coven at the age of five and to have become a Magister at the age of 28. He traced his Witchblood back to 1734 and a Traditional coven in the Warwickshire area. In the 1960s he came to know a number of Gardnerian Witches and in the early 1960s he formed a coven with a number of leading occultists of the day. His ideas about the Craft featured in Justine Glass’ book Witchcraft, the Sixth Sense.14 The Cochrane tradition was more male-oriented than Gardnerian Craft and had a stronger emphasis on the agricultural cycle and links with the land.
Gardnerian and Alexandrian Craft have been taken to both the United States and to Canada. The Gardnerian Tradition was taken to the United States in 1964 by Rosemary and Raymond Buckland who founded a flourishing branch of the movement. Some of the ethos of the Gardnerian Tradition evolved differently in the United States than in its English birth-place, in that there has been stricter adherence to the Book of Shadows than is found in English covens. This formalism has had the effect of creating a strong and powerful Gardnerian Wiccan tradition in the United States, something that is not easy to do when transplanting from Europe a tradition rooted in the land. Gardnerian and Alexandrian Craft in Canada has had more contact with English covens and has evolved slightly differently from the United States.
Robert Cochrane died in June 1966, reputedly from an accidental overdose of the amanita mushroom, but covens in Britain and, in the United States, the Roebuck coven, have continued working in the Cochrane tradition. Evan John Jones and Doreen Valiente, authors of Witchcraft: A Tradition Renewed15 and The Rebirth of Witchcraft16 have published work derived from Robert Cochrane but this is rather different from the original and has evolved into a more Goddess-oriented tradition.
America has also developed its own Craft traditions. With its larger population and willingness to try anything new and different, Wicca, like other religious groups in the US, tends to have more sects than in the UK. As well as the Gardnerian, Alexandrian and other traditional groups, new groups appear all the time as people start their own covens and decide to call their particular interpretation of Gardnerian, Alexandrian or other Wicca by a new name. For those who are interested, Margot Adler, a Wiccan priestess and the grand-daughter of the founder of Adlerian psychology, has published a book entitled Drawing Down the Moon17 which gives a comprehensive account of Wicca in the US.
One branch of Wicca that began in the United States is the Dianic Craft which was developed by Morgan McFarland and Hungarian Witch, Zsuzsanna Budapest. This was inspired by the Women’s Movement. Dianic covens have a matriarchal focus. Many exclude men and see their tradition as a sisterhood, as wimmin’s religion. Others work with men, but see their role as less important than that of women. Many Dianic groups worship only the Goddess and those that acknowledge the God see the male deity as a part of the mystery of the Goddess.
A related movement is the feminist Craft, one of whose principal exponents is the American Witch Starhawk. On Samhain (Hallowe’en) 1979 her book The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess18 was published in California. This stimulated the founding of thousands of covens, primarily though not exclusively of women, in the
