5. The Craft of Invention: The Founding of the Modern Witchcraft Religion of Wicca

The founding process of the modern Witchcraft religion of Wicca begins with the invention of a tradition, leads to the invention of a founder, undergoes the discovery of both inventions and re-invents itself to survive. Currently Witchcraft is portrayed by its practitioners as a religion of invention with individual creativity at its core. Understanding the convolutions and convulsions of the birth of modern Witchcraft is central to understanding its character and structure today.

'“Magic! Witchcraft! Stuff and nonsense. No one believes in such things nowadays. It was all burning evil-smelling powders, muttering words. The Devil jumped up, and you sold him your soul. That was all there was to it.” But was that really all?' So begins Gerald Gardner’s High Magic’s Aid and, perhaps, a new chapter in the sociology of religion, if not in history. It certainly did not mark any moment in literature. Yet despite the dreariness of the prose and inadequacy of characterisation and plot, this novel achieves its aim: it answers its own question. Gardner portrays witchcraft as something more than the devilish pacts and powders. He shows it to have been a pre-Christian fertility cult. His ruse is the past tense. Witchcraft, whatever it was, is not what Gardner intends it to be. In retrospect we see a man in the process of building a new faith. Witchcraft is no longer what we thought it was. But is it now what Gardner meant it to be?

Five years after High Magic’s Aid Gardner publicly claimed to be a member of “one of the ancient covens of the Witch Cult which still survive in England.” Moreover, he claimed to be writing on