There is a war going on in the academic world… It’s not a bloody battle but one being fought with stylus pens and overhead projectors. The winner of this war will sit on a throne that is thousands of years in the making… it is the war to either prove or disprove Wicca as being the predominant religion of pre-Christian Europe.
Notable professors like Ronald Hutton of Bristol University are tapping away at the increasingly popular notion that Wicca was once the law of the land in Europe before the advent of Christianity. Instead, Hutton claims that Wicca “draws on some ancient images and ideas but reflects more directly a post-Christian revival of interest in paganism that began around 1800.”(1)
Many proponents of this ideology have gone so far as to assert that Gerald Gardner “invented” Wicca largely from scratch which would make it the most modern of all religions, conjured up at nearly the same time as Scientology. But it must be noted here that Hutton himself does not make such wild assertions, instead he refers to Gardner as Wicca’s “great publicist, who may have developed it with his friends; but its origins ultimately remain unknown.”(1)
Wiccans have only recently been able to change the tide of public opinion on whether or not they are practicing a ‘real’ religion. United States President, George W. Bush (then Governor of Texas) found himself at the tail end of this debate when he was quoted as saying he “[did not] think that witchcraft is a religion”.(2) The American public’s contentious response to this now infamous quote has made clear that religious freedom is alive and well in America.
But the latest stage in coming out of the “broom closet” has been the Wiccan’s fight for validation of their heritage. At the epicenter of this debate is whether or not Wicca can claim the allegiance or membership of the many people who were tried and executed for “heresy” during Pietism, the Inquisition or even the Salem Witch Trials. If at least a few of these poor souls actually considered themselves to be “Wiccan” then it justifies a stronger connection between the Paganism of pre-Christian Europe and Wicca today. (The etymology of the word Wicce, roughly meaning: to conjure, incidentally begins around the same time as the Inquisition).
Previously, “neo-pagans” (as they are labeled by those who are not sensitive to the debate) have relied on anecdotal evidence to convince others that they follow a “pre-Christian” religion. The most common of these factoids being that people (even Christians) still participate in the pagan ritual of decorating eggs at the time of the spring equinox. This is an art form that can legitimately be traced all the way back to pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons and Germanic people (3) from there to ancient Greece and Egypt.
But are Easter eggs really Wiccan by today’s standards? Detractors argue that since Christian culture has adopted the practice as their own and reduced it to a hobby-craft (instead of the fertility ritual that it once was) that the meaning was lost in translation and therefore irrelevant. But was the meaning lost? One could just as easily argue that most Christians are aware (thanks to the internet) that even the word “Easter” itself is of Pagan origin.
The problem here is not that people refuse to accept Easter’s Pagan heritage… it’s that they refuse to accept that modern day Wiccans in specific have the right to claim these sorts of practices as parts of their “new” religion. This line of thinking is non sequitur in that it would be the same mainstream Christian society denying witches the ownership of practices that they previously condemned them for owning.
Hutton’s belief that Wicca is a modern religion with little connection to Paganism “of antiquity” strikes some scholars and historiophiles as a bit of a jump. They argue that under this logic, Christianity today bears no resemblance to the Judaism of ancient times and therefore should be chunked into a new bracket itself. Often Hutton has been criticized for playing a game of one-upmanship with people (scholars and otherwise) who take issue with his findings. (4) But it must be noted here that Hutton has made clear that he has no intention of denying Pagans “the status of religion”. And that they have a very long “pedigree which [he] traced back to Hellenistic Egypt.”(5)
Still, that is not enough of an appropriation for today’s Wiccans. There are emotional, historical and political objectives which are (albeit unofficially) part of the Wiccan religion that must be considered by anyone wishing to enter into the debate. It is the untidy little fact that everything Westerners think they know about history has been edited with a Christian pen which opens the discussion to emotional turmoil.
The discussion becomes one of fairness vs. burden of proof. Pagans can no more prove that someone cast their circle with the exact same intentions in ancient times as Christians could prove that the King James Bible is an accurate translation. So while Hutton and others often speak amicably of Pagans, their studies and categorizations are occasionally used for further persecution. By way of deliberate misidentification of a principle with its representatives, Pagans are expected to be historians or archaeologists and dig up all the necessary evidence to prove their heritage to a hypercritical Christian society that hid it away from them in the first place.
Wikipedia entries on this subject are constantly and fervently being chopped apart, argued with, and re-entered (4) in a sociopolitical debate that will only become more heated as more propaganda comes about and the occasional activist attempts to rewrite what we already know to be true:
Witchcraft has always been a religion. Witchcraft is referred to in the Holy Bible and therefore it predates said text. Wicca is simply the most recently organized denomination of that religion.
