Overview of the Wicca Religion

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Wicca
Imagine you are walking through the woods, it’s chilly and from a distance you hear a chanting floating across the wind. The sound has an eerie lulling sound, urging you to follow the new melody. Your curiosity gets the best of you so you follow the noise. You enter a clearing and witness a group of individuals around a fire, chanting and dancing. What is your first impression? Have you stumbled upon a satanic cult? Or maybe are you witnessing a vibrant, misunderstood religion. Wicca, is a religion very commonly misunderstood to be affiliated with the devil and rituals containing black magic. To the uneducated mind, this is what we think when we hear the word Wicca, or more commonly known as Witch.
Defined by Margot Adler, writer for Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History, “Wicca is the term commonly used to describe several different traditions of contemporary Paganism—an earth-centered religion that reveres nature; celebrates seasonal and lunar cycles; and worships a goddess, or many goddesses, or sometimes a goddess and a god” (637-638). It is a religion that focuses on worshipping an earth god or goddess, using their power and the earth’s elements for good. For a misunderstood religion it has much history behind it and a deep core belief system.
Wicca is an old religion, having begun “more than thirty-five thousand years ago” as stated by Starhawk, a Wiccan (qtd in Allen 18). Even though it had started long before him and many events involving witchcraft had happened, research has shown that a man named Gerald Gardner was the one who brought the religion of Wicca to the public eye in the 1950s (Allen 19). Gardner said it was thought to be the pre-Christian religion of Europe called the “old religion” (Adler 637). ...

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Works Cited

Adler, Margot. “Wicca.” Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History. 637-638. US: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1998. History Reference Center. Web. 4 Nov. 2013.
Allen, Charlotte. “The Scholars and the Goddess.” Atlantic Monthly(10727825) 287.1 (2001): 18-22. Academic Search Premier. Web. 4 Nov. 2013.
Cantrel, Gary. Wiccan: Beliefs & Practices. Woodbury: Llewelly Publications, 2001. Print.
Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. “Wicca.” The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft & Wicca. 3rd ed. 2012. Print.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. “The Normalization of Goddess Religion.” Feminist Theology: The Journal of the Britain & Ireland School of Feminist Theology 13.2 (2005): 151-157. Academic Search Premier. Web. 4 Nov. 2013.
Stanley, Tim. “Give Me that Old Time Religion.” History Today 63.8 (2013): 50. Academic Search Premier. Web. 4 Nov. 2013.

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