Modern witchcraft

In the second half of the 20th century, a self-conscious revival of pre-Christian paganism occurred in the United States and Europe. The foundation of this revival was witchcraft, or wicca (said to be an early Anglo-Saxon word for witchcraft). Wicca is interpreted simply as the nature and fertility religion of pre-Christian Europe and is based on books such as Charles Leland's Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches (1899), Margaret Murray's The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), and Robert Graves's The White Goddess (1948). Although they are now considered unreliable by scholars, such books gave inspiration to some people seeking spiritual alternatives. The writings of Englishman Gerald Gardner, who in his book Witchcraft Today (1954) claimed that he was a witch initiated by a surviving coven, imparted much of the alleged lore and rituals of English witches. Although his claims have been questioned, covens of modern witches sprang up under Gardner's inspiration and spread to the United States in the 1960s. This form of witchcraft-with its feeling for nature, its colorful rituals, its love of fantasy, and its challenge of conventional religion and society-harmonized well with the countercultural mood of the 1960s and grew rapidly during that decade.

Modern witchcraft continued to prosper during the subsequent decades. Many followers of the ecological and feminist movements found in wicca a religion with congenial themes. Wiccans emphasized the sacred meaning of nature and its cycles and the coequal role of gods and goddesses and of priests and priestesses. Some wiccan groups, called Dianic (after the goddess Diana), include only women and worship the goddess exclusively. Closely related "neopagan" religions have also appeared in revivals of ancient Egyptian, Celtic, Greek, and Nordic religions.

Wicca perceives itself as a modern religion based on the broad themes of ancient pre-Christian paganism, although it is not drawn directly from paganism-for example, wicca eschews some features of the old paganism, such as animal sacrifice. Increasingly, wicca draws from many pagan traditions, with the result that the distinctions between witchcraft, occultism, neopaganism, and various strands thereof have become blurred. Modern witchcraft is entirely different from Satanism or the diabolical witchcraft imagined by the persecutors of past centuries. Major wiccan themes include love of nature, equality of male and female, appreciation of the ceremonial, a sense of wonder and belief in magic, and appreciation of the symbolism and psychological realities behind the gods and goddesses of antiquity.

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