Every now and then someone will tell me they’re a traditional witch — not hoodoo, not ceremonial, not chaos magic or folk practice or anything like that. No, they’ll say, they follow the old ways. And what they mean by that is Wicca.
Which is kind of like saying you practice ancient medicine, and then pulling out a bottle of Tylenol.
Wicca is not ancient. Not in any historical sense. It is a 20th-century religion that incorporates a few bits of older lore and a lot of Victorian fantasy, welded together with some Margaret Murray and Aleister Crowley, seasoned with folklore-sounding verbiage, and packaged as if it were The Old Religion™. But in truth? It dates to the late 1930s. That’s after cornflakes, after jazz, after the invention of television.
This doesn’t mean Wicca is bad. It just means it’s not old. We’re absolutely allowed to like and to practice new things.
There’s also the other small matter of using "Wicca" as a synonym for witchcraft. Because of how language works, once this is established it's established, and it is established. Many people use Wicca as a word that means any witchcraft, and Wiccan as meaning any witch. However, the formal Wiccan religion is not the only, or even the most prevalent, style of witchcraft that is practiced in the world.
What’s tiresome is the persistent myth that Wicca is the one true ancient way, that it represents an unbroken chain of pre-Christian priestesscraft going back to the caves of Lascaux. And that anyone who questions this narrative is either anti-woman, anti-nature, or not a real witch.
Now, in case you’re wondering where this idea came from — you can thank Gerald Gardner. Gardner was a British civil servant and amateur occultist who, around 1940, claimed to have been initiated into a secret surviving coven of witches in the New Forest. These witches, he said, preserved the remnants of a pre-Christian fertility religion. That story eventually turned into what we now call Wicca. It was heavily influenced by ceremonial magic (especially the Golden Dawn and Thelema), by early 20th-century nudist movements (Gardner was a big fan), and by the work of Margaret Murray, who proposed — without much evidence — that there had been a pan-European pagan witch cult secretly surviving under the nose of Christianity.
To say that historians don’t take Murray seriously is putting it mildly. But Gardner did. And so did a lot of early Wiccans. And that’s where the myth of the “Old Religion” comes from — not from folklore, but from a specific 1921 book that got traction at a time when Gardner and others wanted to believe it.
It should also be said that Gardner’s Wicca wasn’t just made up from nothing — it borrowed heavily from existing sources. Ritual magic, Freemasonry, folk Catholicism, and yes, some genuine British folklore all played a role. But this isn’t unique. Most magical systems are hybrid in nature.
What’s frustrating is that this pretense gets in the way of actual learning. People will sometimes dismiss folk magic traditions like hoodoo, powwow, or brujerÃa as "less spiritual" than Wicca. They treat folk magic as transactional and Wicca as transcendent. But what they’re really responding to is packaging. Wicca looks like a religion. It has rules. It has ceremonies. It has a Book of Shadows (which, incidentally, was originally just a blank notebook for your own use, not a sacred text handed down from time immemorial). Wicca has special tools and sabbats and incense and titles. It gives people the sense of being part of a secret club. It flatters you into thinking you're practicing something timeless.
Also, many Wiccans, particularly in the United States, are recent converts from Abrahamic religions — and bring with them, often unconsciously, that old habit of assuming theirs alone is the one right way. It becomes not just a belief, but a moral imperative: you’re doing it wrong if you don’t do it this way, and must change to my way (or else get the highway.) The missionary impulse may have changed costumes, but it didn’t flee. With Wicca being a popular magical practice and one to which many occult shops cater, it influences the other practices and starts these notions that "bad karma" or "times three" will happen to magicians who don't adhere to Wicca's specific ideas of good and bad use of magic.
I think we’d be better off — all of us — if we approached magical traditions like what they really are: folkways, tools, worldviews, and inherited ideas that change with the needs of the people using them. We don’t need to pretend that everything dates to “the burning times.” Especially since, in most of those witch trials, the people getting burned weren’t even practicing anything we’d call magic today — and the few who were folk healers were usually Christian women using Psalm readings and home remedies.
So if you like Wicca — great. Practice it. You do you. Just maybe don’t try to tell your rootworking brethren that their spells "aren’t real witchcraft" because they don't call quarters or use a boline, or insist their magic spells adhere to your religion's ethical code.