Witchcraft Lite

There are maybe fifty thousand Americans engaged in “Wicca” — enough to make the practice interesting, or at least to make interesting the question of what those fifty thousand see in it. And so, in The Triumph of the Moon, the English historian Ronald Hutton has set out to trace the history of modern witchcraft.

The story of Wicca, according to Hutton, began in 1936 when Gerald Brosseau Gardner, an unremarkable plantation manager in Singapore, retired to England. There, in the New Forest, he met a wealthy woman known as “Old Dorothy” who claimed to be the leader of a coven that had survived from ancient times. And so, in September 1939 (when most of England had other things on its mind), Gardner became a witch. The rites were depicted by Gardner in his novel High Magick’s Aid and consisted, as Hutton explains, mainly of naked fertility dances and feasting. The performers “venerated a goddess and a god, whose names were secret, the former predominant in winter, the latter in summer.” They claimed North as the most sacred direction, believed in reincarnation, and strained to develop psychic powers. They organized themselves in covens led by a high priestess and priest, and had eight ritual tools, “of which the most important were the knife, the censer, and the cord.”

That moment when Gardner met Old Dorothy may have been the last time there was a unified thing called Wicca. Gardner had disciples who anathematized one another, and those disciples had, of course, their own disciples. The successive covens, in the endless detail Hutton presents, resemble grade-school cliques. A psychologist, Charles Cardell, who formed one splinter group, refused to recognize Gardner and his disciples as witches until “they produced the traditional passwords, of which they seemed to be ignorant.”

Nonetheless, all Wiccan sects have one thing in common: Each claims a link to ancient paganism. Unfortunately, that’s one thing none of them has. Comparing contemporary Wiccan rituals with ancient European religions, studying the language of modern magic spells, and examining archaeological evidence, Hutton shows that no present-day Wiccan sect has roots that antedate 1900. Indeed, many witches now refer to the “Old Religion” as merely a metaphor or a “foundation myth.”

If Wicca does have connections with old religion, it is not paganism but old-fashioned Christian heresy. Many of the original Wiccans considered themselves Christians who had rejected only the “corrupt” Church. Still today, most Wiccans see themselves not as fighting the Judeo-Christian tradition, but as “warriors in a constant battle of good magic against bad.” (During World War II, in a ceremony called Operation Cone of Power, a group of witches helped the Allied cause by directing “a cone of magical energy” against Hitler.) Realizing that “witch” conjures up images not of good works but of black hats and broomsticks, modern practitioners insist they are “Wiccans”: nature-worshippers, not devil-worshippers.

In Hutton’s sample of sixty-four Wiccans, forty-seven were previously atheists. Hutton makes little of this statistic. In fact, he denies that recruits are trying to make up for the lack of religious upbringing. Even if he’s right, however, that Wiccans are “people who have already found their purpose in life and wish to enhance and fulfill it,” there’s a reason they chose pagan witchcraft — for it is “religion” without any strings attached. Its best-known commandment, “Do what you will as long as it harms none,” is, to put it mildly, open to interpretation. Even magic — which all Wiccans practice in some form or other — doesn’t require real belief. Magical operations, writes Hutton, “are rarely undertaken if they appear to run against the natural course of events or to be based upon unreasonable expectations.”

If Hutton dispels suspicions that Wicca involves Satanic practices, he also indicates how thin it is. Lacking stable traditions, rituals, or beliefs, Wicca — upon its arrival in the United States in the 1960s — was first appropriated by feminists, when WITCH (the Women’s International Conspiracy from Hell) issued a manifesto that claimed witchcraft “had been the religion of all Europe before Christianity.” Its suppression had been “a war against feminism, for the religion had been served by the most courageous, aggressive, independent, and sexually liberated women in the populace.” Nine million witches were slaughtered to erase the sect. And to regain their freedom, modern women need to become witches again: “female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal.”

The bizarre and easily demolished claim that nine million women had been sacrificed for being “independent” is typical of Wicca’s continuing availability for co-opting by politically motivated groups (most recently, by environmentalists). And it is an example of why we should perhaps worry about modern pagan witchcraft, thin and silly though it is. Religious movements without beliefs, traditions, or rituals — movements, in other words, that merely play at religion — are empty vessels waiting for someone dangerous to come along and fill them.

Naomi Schaefer is an assistant editor at Commentary.