According to Wikipedia
Origins
The history of Wicca is much debated. Gardner claimed that the religion was a survival of matriarchal Pagan religions of pre-historic Europe, taught to him by members of the New Forest Coven; their rites were fragmentary, and he had substantially rewritten them. It has been posited by authors such as Aidan Kelly and Francis X. King that Gardner invented the rites in their entirety,[31] incorporating elements from the thesis of Dr. Margaret Murray, incantations from Aradia[32] and practices of ceremonial magic.[33] Philip Heselton concludes that while Gardner may have been mistaken about the ancient origins of the religion, his statements about it were largely made in good faith. Gardner's account is as follows: After retiring from adventuring around the globe, Gardner encountered the New Forest coven. Subsequently fearing that the Craft would die out,[34] he worked on his book Witchcraft Today, releasing it in 1954, followed by The Meaning of Witchcraft in 1959. These books formed the basis for the growth of Wicca from the 1960s onwards. Many of Gardner's rites and precepts can be shown to have come from the writings of earlier occultists and other extant sources, and the remaining original material is uncohesive and mostly takes the form of substitutions or expansions within unoriginal material. Roger Dearnaley describes it as a patchwork.[35]
Some, such as Isaac Bonewits, have argued that Valiente and Heselton's evidence points to an early 20th century revival pre-dating Gardner, rather than an intact old Pagan religion. This argument points to some of Gardner's historical claims which agree with the scholarship of that period but contradict later scholarship. Bonewits writes, "Somewhere between 1920 and 1925 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."[36] 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.[37] Both of these ideas were widely accepted in academic literature and the popular press at the time.[38]
 MoonlitAquaSoul · Wed Apr 02, 2008 @ 03:03am · 0 Comments |
