History of
Wicca
While the ritual format of Wicca is styled after late
Victorian era occultism (even co-founder Doreen Valiente
admits seeing influence from Aleister Crowley), the
spiritual content is inspired by older Pagan faiths, with
Buddhist and Hindu influences.
Due to historical suspicions, it is seems very likely that
Gardner's rites and precepts were taken from other
occultists and was not in fact anything new to the world.
There is very little in the Wiccan rites that cannot be
shown to have come from earlier extant sources. The
original material is not cohesive and mostly takes the form
of substitutions or expansions within unoriginal material.
Roger Dearnaley, in An Annotated Chronology and
Bibliography of the Early Gardnerian Craft, describes it as
a patchwork.
Heselton, writing in Wiccan Roots and later in Gerald
Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration, argues that
Gardner was not the author of the Wiccan rituals but
received them in good faith from an unknown source. (Doreen
Valiente makes this claim regarding the "basic skeleton of
the rituals," as Margot Adler puts it in Drawing Down the
Moon.) He notes that all the Crowley material that is found
in the Wiccan rituals can be found in a single book, The
Equinox vol no. or Blue Equinox. Gardner is not known to
have owned or had access to a copy of this book, although
it is certain that he met Crowley towards the end of the
latter’s life. Gardner admited "the rituals he received
from Old Dorothy's coven were very fragmentary, and in
order to make them workable, he had to supplement them with
other material."
Some, such as Isaac Bonewits, have argued that Valiente and
Heselton's evidence points to an early th century revival
predating Gardner, rather than an intact old Pagan
religion. The argument points to historical claims of
Gardner's that agree with scholarship of a certain time
period and contradict later scholarship. Bonewits writes,
"Somewhere between and in England some folklorists appear
to have gotten together with some Golden Dawn Rosicrucians
and a few supposed Fam-Trads to produce the first modern
covens in England; grabbing eclectically from any source
they could find in order to try and reconstruct the shards
of their Pagan past." Crowley published the aforementioned
Blue Equinox in .
The idea of primitive matriarchal religions, deriving
ultimately from studies by Johann Jakob Bachofen, was
popular in Gardner's day, both among academics (e.g., Erich
Neumann, Margaret Murray) and amateurs such as Robert
Graves. Later academics (e.g. Carl Jung and Marija
Gimbutas) continued research in this area, and later still
Joseph Campbell, Ashley Montagu and others became fans of
Gimbutas' theories of matriarchies in Old Europe.
Matriarchal interpretations of the archaeological record
and the criticism of such work continue to be matters of
academic debate. Some academics carry on research in this
area (such as the World Congress on Matriarchal Studies).
Critics argue that such matriarchal societies never
actually existed and are an invention of researchers such
as Margaret Murray. This is disputed by documentaries such
as "Blossoms of Fire" (about contemporary Zapotec society).
The idea of a supreme Mother Goddess was common in
Victorian and Edwardian literature: the concept of a Horned
God — especially related to the gods Pan or Faunus — was
less common, but still significant. Both of these ideas
were widespread.
