Orange Slices, Simmer Pots, and Naked Dancing: A Brief and Incomplete History of Modern Witchcraft

Yule logs, dried orange slices strung across your windows, decorated trees and simmer pots – all the marks of a neopagan holiday season! Wait, that’s Christmas, you say? Well, can’t it be both? A brief history of modern witchcraft, just in time for the winter solstice celebration.

Orange Slices, Simmer Pots, and Naked Dancing: A Brief and Incomplete History of Modern Witchcraft

Researched and written by Averill Earls, PhD

Produced by Averill Earls, PhD and Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD

Averill: If you’re like me, the day after the American Thanksgiving you’ve already erected a fresh-smelling pine tree in your living room, strung it with lights and dangled glass baubles precariously from its springy branches. Maybe you put a few wreaths up, hang a sock or two by the fire, or put electric candles in the windows. Most people call these “Christmas decorations,” because, since the 9th century, most Christians have celebrated the birth of Jesus on December 25. (Since no one really knows what date Jesus was born on – someone forgot to record that in ye olde Bible – it’s likely that some Roman emperor decided to co-opt one or more of the important dates associated with a number of pre-Christian Roman events: Saturnalia, during which people feasted and exchanged gifts, and/or the birthday of the Indo-European god Mithra, whose cult was popular with Roman soldiers.) But, of course, no one will be surprised to learn that Mary and Joseph didn’t put up a tree in the manager at any point before, during, or after their baby was born, nor did they hang up his socks to receive little gifts, or make wreaths out of dried fruit or flowers or pine branches. Those are winter traditions sourced from a variety of pre-Christian European customs and assembled into the jolly festivus that dominates December in most of North America and Europe. None of this is news to any of you, listeners, I’m sure. But if you’re really like me, your instagram algorithm is (regrettably, but also deliciously) packed with etsy witches and pagan influencers giving tutorials for homemade “Solstice” decorations and “Yule” gifts – and those look and feel very “Christmasy,” even if they aren’t.

Sarah: Where are we going with this? Bear with us, because this might seem like a hard right turn, but it will make a kind of sense by the end of the episode. Today we’re going to celebrate those so-called “pagan” winter traditions, and the etsy witches and pagan influencers who are spreading their craft ideas, with a brief history of a 20th century movement that also sourced itself from a variety of pre-Christian European practices: Wicca, or modern Witchcraft.

I’m Averill

And I’m Sarah.

And we are your historians for this bonus episode of Dig.

Sarah: We are so thankful for all of our Patreon supporters – especially our Auger and Excavator level patrons: Alissa, Maria, Colin, Denise, Edward, Jessy, Judy, Karen, Lauren, Lisa, Megan, and Susan! Welcome and thank you to our newest auger, Ben! We can’t thank you enough. Listener, if you enjoy what we do here but aren’t yet a patron of this show, it’s easy: just go to patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more.

Averill: As always, I want to acknowledge the many scholars whose work I’m drawing from for this episode. Diana Purkiss, Julia Phillips, Ethan Doyle White, and Helen Berger in particular were important for helping me weave together the complex and fascinating history of the neopagans and “Wiccans.” This is far from a complete history of Wicca or any of the neopagan movements of the 20th century – really more of an amuse bouche to whet your appetite and get you feeling witchy this Yuletide season. And we want to be sensitive to the fact that, like Spiritualism, this is very much a living movement with tens of thousands of practitioners. As we’ll discuss, the decentralization of neopaganism and even Wicca more specifically means that different practitioners may understand their personal and coven history very differently from the stories we’ll tell today. In fact, we’d welcome practitioners to share their own histories with us and our community through listener mail or comments on our facebook group Dig History Pod Squad or on our instagram or wherever. I personally find the multitudes contained within these practices and interpretations of the history fascinating. If it wasn’t already such a well-beaten path, I could see myself taking this up as my next project! Though I think there’s more to be done on queer neopaganism… but that’s a question to contemplate another day. For now, we’ll work with what we’ve got.

Sarah: According to sociologist Helen Berger, “Neopagan is an umbrella term for spiritual practices that share a view of the world as enchanted and the earth as sacred.”^[1] Most venerate the divine feminine and masculine, though reject binarism and others focus exclusively on a goddess or goddesses. They may self-identify as Witch or Wiccan, though not universally, and some consider “Wiccan” to specifically refer to individuals trained in “traditional” (Gardnerian) covens — we’ll come back to Gardner in a moment.^[2] Many refer to their practice as “the Craft,” or, as Berger puts it, “something that is learned and practiced and not as a devotion or set of beliefs.”^[3]

Averill: Modern witchcraft emerged out of several root systems. For one, occult and magic were re-popularized in Victorian England, which we’ve seen in our discussions of Spiritualism and seances, but also manifested in individuals and secret societies who were searching for power, wealth, and eternal life. Certainly mid-20th century witches were influenced by occultists like Aleister Crowley, member of the esoteric cult the Golden Dawn and founder of the “religion” Thelema, as well as the Freemasons with their secret rituals and memberships. There are echoes of early Spiritualism in Wicca in its rituals and feminine authority. But there are also clear connections between the twentieth-century founders of modern Witchcraft and the nineteenth-century scholarly publications on historical witchcraft cases, like the writings of scholars like Karl Ernst Jarcke, Jules Michelet, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Jarcke was a Catholic who wanted to exonerate the Church for its execution of alleged “witches” during the European panics by arguing that there were real Satanic cults with pre-Christian pagan roots that drank the blood of babies and murdered people. Michelet argued that actually the early modern pagan witch-cult wasn’t “degenerate and morally repugnant, but had instead been a liberating egalitarian movement, aimed at freeing women and the working classes from the oppressive domination of the nobility and clergy.”^[4] Late nineteenth-century feminists like Gage repeated Michelet’s interpretation. Coven founders, however, typically stretched well beyond the boundaries of these Victorian influences, or didn’t even acknowledge them! Some practitioners claimed connections to 16th century witch cults, as well as ancient goddess worship, nature-based religious practices, and various European pre-Christian or pagan pasts.

Sarah: The place between what is “empirically” provable and what practitioners claimed as their “history”, is, according to Diane Purkiss, essential to understanding Wicca and Wiccans.^[5] Most modern witches claim that their practices stem from early modern and/or ancient traditions, sometimes passed down through generations, sometimes recovered in chance encounters with “discovered” covens. But, as Helen Berger notes, contemporary Witches, or “Wiccans,” as many adherents self-identify, are specifically beholden to the movement that developed in England in the 1940s and 50s, which built on those Victorian influences, and then was exported to North America in the 1960s.^[6] Historian Richard Hutton called “Wicca” the “only religion England has ever given the world.”^[7]

Averill: Though the significance of his story is contested, one of the first people to popularize “Wicca” as a religious movement was Gerald Gardner. In 1939, Gardner was an English civil servant.  According to his own accounting, he made a discovery that year of a coven of witches led by “old Dorothy,” who showed him their rituals and sacred books.^[8] He then produced the Book of Shadows, which he claimed he got from “old Dorothy” and that it dated back to the 16th century – though he had to make some substitutions as the “originals” were too degraded to replicate perfectly. Though quiet at first, after the abolition of the last remaining British anti-witchcraft law in 1951 – following the embarrassing trial of Nellie Duncan – Gardner published several books on the lost Witch cult of England, and set out to revive the practice himself. The first of these was Witchcraft Today, published in 1954.

(As an aside – an American named Charles Godfrey Leland basically did the same thing 50 years earlier, claiming to have received the ancient secrets of a Tuscan witch religion, which he wrote about in his book Aradia. And then an English Egyptologist, Margaret Murray, published several scholarly articles about a “Witch-Cult” or “Dianic Cult” that was persecuted during the European witch hunts. Gardner was almost certainly aware of these writings, but tends to get most of the credit for popularizing what grew into the modern “Craft”.)^[9]

Sarah: Yeah, I pointed to some of that in the episode about the myth of the midwife witch, which Margaret Murray played a huge role in that, and it comes out of a sort of weird bubble of writing in this period. It’s interesting to come back to this stuff.

According to historian Helen Cornish, Gardner’s writings established an orthodoxy for the movement.^[10] Then, as Julia Phillips has shown, Cecil Williamson – the founder of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, in Boscastle Cornwall, in 1951 – supported that orthodoxy by legitimizing and providing physical “evidence” of a continuous witch cult’s existence in England from the 1500s to Gardner’s discovery of them in 1939.^[11] Significantly, though, Gardner doesn’t actually place himself as the originator of the religion. He derived his “legitimacy” by claiming a centuries-old lineage. For many Wiccans, both in the 1950s and 60s at the start of the movement, and today, lineage is an important part of the Craft. But it remains, effectively, decentralized — so even lineage-claiming isn’t always something people agree on!

Averill: History becomes, for many practitioners, personal metaphor rather than a set of collectible and footnotable facts. As one Wiccan put it, “the argument as to whether our witchcraft traditions are ‘authentic’ seem to be the usual male intellectual posturing, debating the number of angels on a pinhead.”^[12] In Gardner’s Witchcraft Today, he makes claims about how a race of “little people” in Europe became witches before Christianity was spread by the Roman empire, that Robin Hood had a coven and a high priestess, that the Pope launched an extermination of witches. In his effort to legitimize his claims that he received knowledge of the Craft from a secret coven of English witches, Gardner used plausible history to burrow the Wiccan roots down into the pre-Christian period.

Sarah: Others claimed even deeper roots than Gardner proposed – even as they dismissed the significance of that history. Radical feminist Zsuzsanna Budapest, the Hungarian-American author of The Feminist book of Lights and Shadows and founder of the first “Dianic Wiccan” sect in the 1970s said, “I don’t know whether Goddess-worship is 70,000 or 7,000 years old…but 7,000 years still sounds pretty ancient.”^[13] To her, and other “Dianics,” the foundation of the religion was not the women and men persecuted in the witch panics of the 16th and 17th centuries, but the millenia-old worshippers of the “goddess” and the feminine. Dianic priestess Morgan McFarland of Dallas said that “goddess worship had ‘an ancient universality about it…[but that] at this point it doesn’t really matter whether or not it existed. If not, invent it!”^[14]

Averill: Some “modern witches” consider the history symbolic more than anything. Drawing on a wide range of ethnographic interviews, Margot Adler notes that “The universal old religion may not have existed geographically, but it existed in the Jungian sense that people were tapping a common source.”^[15] Few agreed on or cared about the “true” history of the religion; in many ways, that wasn’t (and isn’t) the point. And even after scholars in the 1970s decidedly disproved the claims of Michelet, Mead, and Gardner, the modern movement was well on its way.^[16]

Sarah: A coven might incorporate “Gardnerian” rituals but cull the parts of Gardner’s practice because of its problematic elements. There is no central authority of the neopagan movement or even Wicca specifically. It is like Spiritualism in its first decades: often radically feminist, decentralized, with power imbued in the local rather than any formal church or hierarchy. It is, for many, explicitly anti-hierarchical. As James Baker put it, the Craft is “the modern syncretization of a number of old and new elements that never ever co-existed, much less were united, before.”^[17]

Averill: There isn’t any kind of conformity in Wicca. Some adhere to a version that puts an English man, Gerald Gardner, as the founder (or maybe populizer) of the modern religion. Others embrace the theology of Zsuzsanna Budapest. And others still rely on local customs or coven “founders” for their practice, claiming a “hereditary tradition” inherited from “traditional hereditary witches” they might meet in a forest. Claire Nahmad, author of Earth Magic, for example, said that “I was fortunate to inherit, as a child, the traditional wisdom of the Craft from my maternal grandmother.”^[18]

Sarah: In 1972, Zsuzsanna Budapest wrote an essay for the Los Angeles-based feminist monthly Sister, in which she called for a feminist spirituality. Politics and religion were interdependent, she claimed, and the dominant religion denigrated women, which meant that women needed to “rewrite the script” and create a religion based on “feminist values.”^[19] Answering that call, women across the US moved to shake off the patriarchal shackles of their religious affiliations – some founding new religions, like the Dianic Witches, and some forming pockets within their religious organizations, like the Woman-Church of the Roman Catholics, and the Protestant Christian Feminists.

Averill: Like Spiritualism at its height, Wicca is/was particularly appealing to white, middle-class, and well-educated individuals. According to Berger, in the early 2000s, 65% of participants in the United States were women, with an estimate of between 150,000-400,000 practitioners.^[20] And also like Spiritualism, the fluidity of practice and belief means that practitioners might simultaneously consider themselves Christians or Jews as well as neopagans. Wicca was well-integrated into second wave white feminism in the 1960s and 70s, the environmental and conservationist movements, counterculturalists, and queer and trans individuals seeking spiritual connection outside of the formal and historically repressive organized religions. I think much of the appeal comes from the fluidity, community, and radical acceptance that is baked into the practice.

Sarah: The various rituals and traditions of modern Witchcraft draw on historical practices of those ancient and early modern “witch cults” (both real and imagined), as well as western esotericism – according to Wouter Hanegraaf, basically everything “consigned to the dustbin of history by Enlightenment ideologues and their intellectual heirs up to the present, because it is considered incompatible with normative conceptions of religion, rationality and science,” and folk magic, which had been and continues to be practiced… well, everywhere.^[21] Today, there are many ways to practice the Craft, but we’ll start with Gardner’s theology. Technically speaking, those who enter Gardnerian covens are supposed to take vows to keep the customs and rituals secret. But, as Berger notes, there have been so many books and articles written about Wiccan rituals and practices that it is hard to know if there are anysecrets remaining.

Averill: Gardnerians typically practice “skyclad” – naked – though, again, not universally. They might use a scourge (a lash or whip) to bring themselves into an altered state of consciousness. They might dance or imbibe or meditate or do any number of things for the same purpose.  Then, together, the coven would focus the force of their wills to encourage an outcome. According to Vivianne Crowley, a psychologist, “Wiccans believe in and practice magic: the science and art of causing change by non-physical means not as yet accepted by science.”^[22]

Sarah: Berger summarizes the tenets of the religion thus:

[It is] a gentle earth religion in which the goddess of fertility and the god of the hunt were venerated. The goddess is eternal but changes from maid to mother to crone. The god is born of the goddess at Yule (December 21), grows to manhood and becomes the goddess’s consort at Beltane (May 1), and dies to ensure the fertility of the crops at Samhain (October 31) to be reborn at the next Yule. The changing relationship of the goddess and god and the corresponding changes in nature are celebrated at the eight sabbats, which are evenly spaced at six-week intervals throughout the year at the solstices, the equinoxes, and in between these solar events at what are referred to as the cross points. Each sabbat celebrates either the beginning or the height of a season. Esabats are traditionally held on the new and full moon.^[23]

Averill: Even if they don’t follow all the rituals framed by Gardner, most Witches learn to meditate, visualize, and have out-of-body experiences in order to raise “energy” for magical workings. Like a number of other New Age religions, Wicca also typically relies on herb and gem knowledge, as well as the trained mind. Magic can be used for any number of things. A friend recently told me that he and his coven did a ritual to bring three of them success in their house hunting and selling ventures, and within a week, all three had success.

Sarah: Coercion, violence, and harm are typically not outcomes that modern witches turn their energy to. Unlike the love magic spells from the ancient world that we discussed in an earlier episode, it is typically considered unethical to use a ritual to force a lover to bend to one’s desire; instead, a ritual might ask that love find a practitioner, in whatever form that takes.^[24]

Averill: At most times and places, including now, magic and religion are usually conceptualized as two separate entities – but, as Helen Berger notes, that distinction is flawed.^[25] When Jesus turned water into wine, it was defined as a miracle. But in any other context, that would be magic. What gets defined as “magic” and what gets defined as “religion” depends on who holds the power.

Sarah: Many of the rituals and practices that the neopagan influencers and etsy witches sell on social media are drawn from various interpretations of Wiccan celebrations of Yule, Saturnalia, the winter solstice, and/or the birth of Gardner’s masculine deity. The hodge-podge approach to the winter holiday season of these modern witches is not all that different from the commercialized and popular rituals of “Christmas.” The amalgamation of the “traditions” and looks of Christmas are cherry-picked from various pre-Christian European traditions, and so too are the aesthetics of the Wiccan winter holidays.

Averill: And there’s nothing wrong with that! Who doesn’t want to make wreaths out of dried oranges, to welcome the sun at solstice or just to fill your home with color and joy? Or fill your house with the smell of a cinnamon-cranberry-rosemary-orange peel simmer pot – to create set intentions with cleansing or protection, or just to create a fragrant holiday atmosphere? Or make a swiss roll cake decorated like a log and featuring lovely tapered candles, whether you’re honoring the Germanic pagan tradition, or because it looks cozy and delicious? Both Christians and neopagans have made fruitful use of the short winter days to create community and raise spirits. So whether you’re welcoming the return of the sun or the birth of your little lord Jesus (lay down his sweet head), happy holidays, friends!

Bibliography

Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon (1986)

Helen Berger, Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America (2005)

Zsuzsanna Budapest, The Feminist book of Lights and Shadows (1976)

Helen Cornish, “Spelling Out History,” Pomegranate (2005)

Ethan Doyle White, Wicca: History, Belief, and Community in Modern Pagan Witchcraft (2015)

Gerald Gardner, Witchcraft Today, (1959)

Malcolm Gaskill, Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches, (HarperCollins Publishers, 2002)

Ronald Hutton,  The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, (Oxford University Press, 1997)

Diane Purkiss, “Modern Witches and Their Past” in The Witchcraft Reader, ed. Darren Oldridge (2019)

C. E. Bechhofer Roberts, The Trial of Mrs. Duncan, (Jarrolds Publishing, 1945)

Nina Shandler, The Strange Case of Hellish Nell, (Da Capo Press, 2006)

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^[1] Helen Berger, “Witchcraft and Neopagamism,” Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America, 30.

^[2] Berger, “Witchcraft and Neopagamism,” 30.

^[3] Berger, “Witchcraft and Neopagamism,” 30.

^[4] Ethan Doyle White, Wicca: History, Belief, and Community in Modern Pagan Witchcraft, (2015) 23-97.

^[5] Diane Purkiss, “Modern Witches and Their Past”, 379.

^[6] Helen Berger, “Witchcraft and Neopagamism,” Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America, 28.

^[7] Richard Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (1999) vii.

^[8] Diane Purkiss, “Modern Witches and Their Past,” 379.

^[9] White, Wicca, 23-97.

^[10] Helen Cornish, “Spelling Out History,” 411.

^[11] Julia Phillips, “The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic: Toward a New History of British Wicca,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, 16:2, (Fall 2021) 173-200.

^[12] Qtd. in Diane Purkiss, “Modern Witches and Their Past,” 380.

^[13] Qtd. in Diane Purkiss, “Modern Witches and Their Past,” 380.

^[14] Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon (1986), 87.

^[15] Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon (1986), 86.

^[16] White, Wicca, 23-97.

^[17] Qtd. in White, Wicca, 23-97.

^[18] Qtd. in Diane Purkiss, “Modern Witches and Their Past,” 380.

^[19] Wendy Griffin, “Webs of Women: Feminist Spiritualities,” Witchcraft and Magic, 55.

^[20] Berger, “Witchcraft and Neopagamism,” 29.

^[21] Qtd. in White, Wicca, 23-97.

^[22] Qtd. in Berger, “Witchcraft and Neopagamism,” 33.

^[23] Berger, “Witchcraft and Neopagamism,” 32-33.

^[24]  Berger, “Witchcraft and Neopagamism,” 34.

^[25] Berger, “Introduction,” 1.