Messages in the Moonlight

The History of Wicca
A Mythological Understanding

The following is the history of Witchcraft (or, more specifically, Wicca) as it was presented in Wicca's early days. Since then, the theories surrounding this story have been disproved. This story, in all its variations, is merely mythological. It is not meant as a true history of anything. I include it here only for its mythological value. Most Wiccans I know do not follow this story even as a mythological one, but as it was believed in the early part of the real Wiccan history, I feel it deserves a space here.

According to the legends, Witchcraft began more than thirty-five thousand years ago. The people believed in the Mother Goddess who brings into existence all life; and the Horned God, who is both the hunter and hunted, who passes through the gates of death so that new life may go on. Hunters dressed in skins and horns in identification with the God and the herds as a form of sympathetic magic to aid the hunt.

Those who had inner power learned that it increased when they worked together. As isolated settlements grew into villages, they linked forces and shared knowledge. Thus the first covens were formed. Deeply attuned to plant and animal life, they tamed where once they had hunted, and they bred sheep, goats, cows, and pigs. Seeds were planted. The hunter become Lord of the Grain, sacrificed when cut in autumn, buried in the womb of the Goddess to later be reborn. The Lady of the Wild Things became the Barley Mother. The cycles of moon and sun marked the times for sowing and reaping and letting out to pasture.

Villages grew into the first towns and cities. The Goddess was painted on the plastered walls of shrines, giving birth to the Divine Child--her consort, son, and seed. Far-flung trade brought contact with the mysteries of Africa and West Asia. In these lands that had once been covered with ice, they found a power that runs like springs of water through the earth (ley lines). They came to find that certain stones increased the flow of power. Those stones were set at the proper points in great marching rows and circles that mark the cycle of time. The year became a great wheel divided into eight parts: the solstices and equinoxes and the cross-quarter days between, times for feasting and bonfires. Mathematics, astronomy, poetry, music, medicine, and the understanding of the workings of the human mind developed side by side with the lore of the deeper mysteries.

But later, cultures that devoted themselves to the arts of war attacked these people of the Old Religion. Indo-European invasions swept over Europe from the Bronze Age on. Warrior Gods drove the Goddess peoples out from the fertile lowlands and fine temples into the hills and mountains. The mythological cycle of Goddess and Consort, Mother and Divine Child, which had held sway for thirty thousand years, was changed to conform to the values of the conquering patriarchies. In Greece, the Goddess, in many guises, "married" the new gods. This resulted in the creation of the Olympian Pantheon. In the British Isles, the victorious Celts adopted many aspects of the Old Religion, and incorporated them into the Druidic mysteries.

The followers of the Old Religion, breeding cattle in the stony hills and living in huts, preserved their beliefs. Clan mothers led the covens, together with the priest who embodied the dying God and underwent a ritualized mock death at the end of his term of office. They celebrated the eight feasts of the Wheel with the wild procession on horseback, singing, chanting, and lighting ritual bonfires. The invading people often joined in; there was mingling and intermarriage.

At first, Christianity brought little change. Peasants saw in the story of Christ only a new version of their own ancient tales of the Mother Goddess and her Divine Child who is sacrificed and reborn. Even the country priests often led the dance at the Sabbats. The covens, which preserved the knowledge of magic, were called Wicca or Wicce. They were the ones who could shape the unseen to their will. As healers, teachers, poets, and midwives, they were the central figures in every community.

Persecution began slowly. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, aspects of the Old Religion were reviving in the form of poems to the Goddess. Cathedrals were built in honor of Mary, who seemed to have taken over some aspects of the Goddess of the Old Religion. To try to stamp out the revival, witchcraft was declared a heretical act. Wars, Crusades, plagues and peasant revolts raged over Europe over the centuries. The stability of the medieval Church was shaken, and the feudal system was beginning to break down. The Christian world was swept by messianic movements and religious revolts, and the Church could no longer calmly tolerate its rivals.

The Inquisition began in 1484. Two years later, two Dominicans, Kramer and Sprenger, published the Malleus Maleficarum. A reign of terror held all of Europe in its grip until the seventeenth century. The persecution was directed mostly against women. Of the hundreds of thousands of witches executed, nearly 80% were women, including children who were believed to inherit "evil" from their mothers. A simple search into the Inquisition or "Burning Times" will give many of the horrid details of that time.

Those of the Old Religion who could escape left for lands where the Inquisition did not reach. They practiced their beliefs in secrecy. After the prosecutions ended in the eighteenth century, memory of the Craft had faded. The stereotypes that remained were ludicrous, laughable, or tragic. The Old Religion remained underground. It was not until the twentieth century that the final Anti-Witchcraft laws in England were repealed, and those of the Old Religion could come out of the "broom" closet.