The Roots of Wicca

There is a good article up at Slate today entitled "Witches’ Brew at Winter Solstice". The author is critical of the Wiccan religion for its reliance on false history.

But in reaching for a usable past, Wiccans trumpet numerous other historical claims that are entirely without merit. The central claim that Wicca is descended from pre-Christian cultures and that it was driven underground by violent Christians was popularized by the writer Starhawk, whose 1979 book The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess is a foundational text for contemporary Wiccans. Starhawk based her teachings on the work of, among others, Marija Gimbutas, a UCLA anthropologist who in the 1970s and 1980s argued that in pre-Christian times there existed a unified, female-centered, Indo-European society that worshipped a Goddess.

Recent scholars, however, have shown that there was no prehistoric Goddess-centered matriarchy. They've also concluded that the Celts probably did not celebrate eight seasonal sabbats, and, alas, that contemporary Wicca was invented in the 1950s by Gerald Gardner, an English civil servant with a deep interest in the 19th-century occult. One can read the brutal truth about all of these debunked theories in a fine article by Charlotte Allen in the Atlantic Monthly (available to subscribers only) and in The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, a superb book by Cynthia Eller.

The conclusion to the piece is perhaps the most important part:

Chastened by the attacks on their bad historiography, Wiccans are growing more likely to say that their faith is based on a love of Wiccan practices, rather than on particular historical claims. It's a heartening development when religious belief isn't dependent on the latest archaeological findings. Wiccans might no longer have to sacrifice intellectual rigor to get their spiritual sustenance.

I started exploring Wicca/neo-paganism around 1997 and, while I don’t consider myself a Wiccan or a pagan, I do find that I have many viewpoints in common with the folks I’ve met along the way. People who held that pre-historical societies were matriarchal and those that dragged the supernatural (spells, reincarnation, auras, et al) into the equation always bugged me. When it comes right down to it, the core beliefs of paganism don’t require there to have been matriarchal societies nor do they require people to have auras or for crystals and candles to have any “magical” properties. From my reading and experiences with folks who identify themselves as pagans or Wiccans, the kernel of their beliefs is simple: it’s all about being in awe of the life around us and its cyclical nature. It’s about holding these things sacred. People are born, grow up, grow old, and then die. Trees sprout leaves in the summer and then they whither and are shed at autumn. One needn’t really believe there is a fairy or a spirit that is the Green Man to appreciate or to revere the return of life in the spring. All of the supernatural stuff I mentioned above – the auras, spells, and the like – they're all symbolic lagniappe. The heart of the matter for pagans is about being able to stand next to a tree and realize that, like every human being, the tree's life started, will go on for a bit, and then it will whither and die. The same goes for your pet cat, your great aunt's parrot, bacteria, and those weird tubeworms that live at the bottom of the ocean. Everything. And when life ends, that wonderful cyclical process we call Mother Nature will sweep up those mortal coils and reuse them in the creation of new life. Everyday we eat dead plants and animals to sustain our lives and to create new ones. Leaves die and fall off of trees. We compost them to make fertilizer so that we can have life spring anew in our gardens in the forms of tasty strawberries and onions and jalapeno peppers, etc. To quote Neil from The Young Ones, "We sow the seeds, nature grows the seeds, and, like, we eat the seeds." It is this interconnectedness of life and its cyclical nature that, to me, is at the heart of paganism and Wicca.

The one point that I take issue with in the Slate article is this:

Religions tend to succeed to the extent that they are not subject to tests of proof. They are based on beliefs in invisible deities and on mystical experiences that can't be explained by one person to another but must be experienced for oneself.

While I don't dispute the tendency mentioned, I think that Wicca, as a religion, is not based on the irrational belief in an invisible deity as is, say, Christianity. Divinity is not revealed to pagans, it is immanent. The cycle of life is within each person and all around us. The mystical isn't to be experienced by the believers via a special liturgy; they're to happen whenever one looks at the world around him- or herself. Wicca is based on a view of the natural world and not on the existence of an invisible deity. And so predicting the success of Wicca might best be gauged by looking at religions with a similar premise.