What is Wicca, where did it actually come from, and how much of the religion can really be traced back to Gerald Gardner?
For the first installment of our Halloween series, Nick of The Occult Rejects returns to Divulgence for a deep dive into the origins of modern Wicca and the complicated story of the man most closely associated with its creation, Gerald Gardner.
We begin by separating Wicca from the much broader history of witchcraft, folk magic, paganism and ceremonial magic before examining Gardner's claim that he encountered a surviving witch tradition in England during the late 1930s. From there, Nick traces the older books, occult movements and religious ideas that may have contributed to what eventually became Gardnerian Wicca.
We explore the influence of Margaret Murray's witch-cult theory, Charles Godfrey Leland's Aradia, Freemasonry and initiatory secret societies, Solomonic magic, ritual tools such as the athame, Eastern religious traditions, sacred sexuality and the development of the Book of Shadows.
A major part of the conversation focuses on Aleister Crowley. We examine Gardner's documented contact with Crowley, his connection to the OTO, similarities between Thelemic material and early Wiccan writings, and the argument that Crowley's influence on the emerging religion was far greater than many modern practitioners realize. We also discuss Doreen Valiente and her enormous role in reshaping early Wiccan material into something with a more distinct identity of its own.
Rather than presenting Wicca as either completely ancient or simply invented from nothing, this conversation explores a more complicated possibility: that Gardner assembled and transformed pieces of numerous older traditions into a new religious system.
We also get into ritual nudity, initiation and secrecy, the Charge of the Goddess, the Great Rite, magical symbolism, the cultural image of the witch, and how religious and occult movements repeatedly borrow, reinterpret and repackage ideas from the traditions that came before them.
And this is only the beginning. Nick will return as we continue our Halloween series and dig even deeper into the history, imagery and mythology surrounding witchcraft and the occult.
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