Wicca & Witchcraft preview

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Wicca & Witchcraft Understanding the dangers

by Elizabeth Dodd

All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society

CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY PUBLISHERS TO THE HOLY SEE

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 The position of the Catholic Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 The difference between Wicca and Witchcraft . . . . . . . . . .5 A History of Wicca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 1900-1950s: Wicca’s Roots in the Occult . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 1960s-1990s: Wicca Flourishes in America . . . . . . . . . . . .9 1990s to the Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10 What Witches Believe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 Thealogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 The Afterlife . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 Magic and Spells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14 The Five Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16 Sacred Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18 How Wiccans Practise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 Ritual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 Wiccan Holy Days – The Wheel of the Year . . . . . . . . . .23 Rites of Passage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 Wicca and the Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26 The Church and Wiccan Thealogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26 The Church and White Magic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27 The Church and Divination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31 The Church and Occultism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35 Wicca and Young People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38 How to Evangelise a Witch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43 Trust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43 Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .47 The Dignity of Women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54

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Introduction Wicca is a strand of modern witchcraft; a new religious movement that grew out of the New Age and Occult movements and was influenced by political trends within feminism and ecology. It is one of a number of ‘neo-pagan’ spiritualities, a term used to describe contemporary pagan religions that revive or are inspired by indigenous and ethnic folklore, mythology and spirituality. In 2001 there were over 31,000 neopagans living in the UK, of which 7, 000 self-identified as Wiccans (Census, 2001, Office for National Statistics). Wiccans are predominantly women – 67 percent of the Wiccans in the 2001 census were female – and often young.

Wicca is a non-hierarchical religion with no figurehead, magisterium or main religious text; every Wiccan is his or her own high priestess. While the religion’s autonomous nature makes it difficult to generalize about trends in its theology, Wiccans are generally duo-theistic (they worship a god and goddess) or pantheists. Ritualised and ceremonial magic are fundamental tenets of the religion and Wiccans can practise alone – as a solitary – or as part of a coven, within or independent of any of a number of the traditions

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that have emerged within the movement. While there are traditions within Wicca that try to assimilate JudeoChristian rituals and practices (for example, by mistakenly incorporating a Saint within a pantheon of deities), Wiccans do not acknowledge the existence of God as understood by Christianity, and for that reason they do not practise Satanism (the worship of Satan as the enemy of God).

The position of the Catholic Church The Church, however, is very clear in her condemnation of Wicca and other New Age or Neo-Pagan spiritualities.

As a pagan, pantheistic movement Wicca involves, by definition, rejection of and opposition to the revealed truth of Christianity. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly underscores the particular dangers of ceremonial, neo-pagan spirituality, saying: 窶連ll practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion.

These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons窶ｦ Recourse to so-called traditional cures does

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not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another's credulity.’ (no.2117) According to the Catechism the practice of magic one of the key elements of Wicca - is inherently sinful, whether or not the intentions behind the spell are malicious. It is for God alone, not man, to have dominion over spirits. Of particular concern to Catholics is the appeal that Wicca holds for the young and vulnerable: attracted by the promise of magical powers and authority over spirits, they can be exposed to grave psychological and spiritual dangers. More will be said about this below, in the chapter on the Church and Wicca, and at the end of the book.

The difference between Wicca and Witchcraft Wiccans optimistically understand their religion as stretching from prehistoric totemic and animist ethnoreligion through the witch-trials and burnings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and find anthropological parallels in the contemporary indigenous religions of Africa and Asia. Unfortunately for the movement, historical and anthropological perspectives on witchcraft do not suggest an historical precedent for an organized movement of self-identified, practising witches: still less that witchcraft was ever a cohesive religion. Neither is there much evidence for the existence

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of a form of religious witchcraft that suffered from persecution: Wiccans often cite the witch trials in, for example, Tudor England and in Salem as evidence of this.

In reality, recent historical theories about witchcraft in England (in particular the work of historians Keith Thomas and Alan MacFarlane) understand historical witchcraft not as a coherent religion, but as a complex social web evolving alongside capitalism. The ThomasMacFarlane theory suggests that accusations of witchcraft served a primarily community purpose alongside the decline of individual charitable obligation in an increasingly impoverished society. The accused were predominantly marginalized individuals – single women or the elderly – and deserving of charity: to address feelings of guilt arising from denying charity to the poor, the rich would blame any subsequent misfortune they suffered on a ‘bewitchment’ by the appellant. The decline of witch-trials in England demonstrably coincided with the implementation of the Poor Law - sixteenth century social security. Complementing the Thomas-MacFarlane theory feminist historians have stressed the importance of gender studies in formulating a theory of witchcraft: it is no coincidence, this theory suggests, that the majority of those accused of witchcraft were women – historically a vulnerable group.

Subsequent theories in anthropology have suggested that witchcraft is effectively created by a tribe or society

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as an explanation for misfortune: this is sociology’s ‘functional’ interpretation of witchcraft. The anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, in his seminal study of witches among the Zande people of North-Central Africa, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, formulates the theory that witchcraft among indigenous peoples exists to explain unfortunate events within a socially relevant framework: if a hut collapses, killing those inside, instead of looking for evidence of structural damage the Zande would understand the hut’s collapse as due to witchcraft. Peoples such as the Zande understand ‘witchcraft’ as virtually synonymous with ‘bad luck’.

Wicca, then, has little to do either with genuinely prehistoric religion, with the witch hunts of Tudor and Stuart England or with the indigenous religions of Africa and Asia. Witchcraft of that sort has nothing in common with the religion as practised by Wiccans today. Modern Wiccans do refer to themselves as witches, but it is important to understand that they do so in a purely modern sense, with no historical or anthropological justification. There is no evidence that modern witchcraft originates any earlier than the nineteenth century.

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A History of Wicca 1900-1950s: Wicca’s Roots in the Occult Modern Wicca’s origins lie in Victorian occultism and the work of anthropologist Dr Margaret Murray. Occultism provided a spiritual and theological springboard for the neo-pagan and Wiccan movements, and many of the religion’s founding members were involved in occult societies such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn - a nineteenth-century occult group roughly structured around Freemasonry - and the Fellowship of the Rosicrucians.

It was a member of this latter society, the amateur anthropologist and archeologist Gerald Gardner, who claimed to have discovered and been initiated into a hidden coven of witches whose tradition stretched back beyond the Spanish Armada, and created modern Wicca on the strength of the authority of this initiation. Gardner was inspired by the work of Dr Murray, whose work, in particular the book Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) – now largely discredited – sought to prove that witchcraft as a consistent religious movement had existed continually from the Neolithic period, only being exposed during the witch trials of the fifteenth century. Murray theorised that witchcraft had existed in opposition to

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Christianity and was part of a larger underground pagan resistance movement.

Gerald Gardner and his friend Aleister Crowley, the infamous occultist, endeavored to recreate the preChristian witch cult Murray claimed to identify, incorporating into it elements of the Victorian occultism both were familiar with: freemasonry, Crowley’s own esoteric Ordo Templi Orientis and religio-philosophy Thelema. Modern witchcraft became increasingly prominent in the 1950s when the repeal of the Witchcraft Act of 1951 legalised the practice of witchcraft. Gardner published a number of books over the decade, among them Witchcraft Today and The Meaning of Witchcraft, that contributed to Wicca (his term for the religion) entering the mainstream consciousness.

1960s-1990s: Wicca Flourishes in America Wicca continued to spread following Gardner’s death in 1964. Fuelled by the emerging New Age culture of the 60s, Wicca was exported with great success to the United States, where it began to emerge across the country in a series of home-grown traditions and covens. These included an Americanised version of Gardner’s own tradition, exported by Raymond Buckland, an American friend of Gardner’s and the self-appointed leader of America’s Wiccan movement, and variations on the theme, such as Zsuzsanna Budapest's Dianic Wicca.

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During the 1970s and 80s Wicca drew the attention of emerging feminist groups: books such as Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance (1979) focused on goddess-worship and the political and social significance of the witchcraft movement for women.

1990s to the Present A raft of literature emerged in the 1980s and 90s to capitalise on Wicca’s growing popularity. As the term became a recognisable signpost within popular culture it began to appear in popular television series: Joss Whedon’s sci-horror series Buffy the Vampire Slayer featured a Wiccan main character studying the craft, while popular 90s horror film The Craft combined Wiccan thealogy with contemporary ‘Goth’ elements of the anti-establishment subculture. Coinciding with this, books explicitly marketed to young people – for example Silver Ravenwolf’s Teen Witch – provided a way into Wicca for young people attracted by its portrayal in the media.