Why Not Wicca?

You’ll have noticed that I only very rarely use the word “Wicca” in reference to my practice. “BTW,” you may say, “generally refers to ‘British Traditional Wicca,’ doesn’t it?” Well, yes. Generally it does. And what I, and my initiates and their initiates, do, certainly often looks like what you’d term Wicca—at least, of the traditional, initiatory kind.

All this is true, and yet… That word. It bothers me, somehow.

I got involved in this initiatory Craft stuff back in the mid-90s, when witches were pop-culture hot and the word “Wicca” was seemingly everywhere. The bookstore shelves groaned with titles, each progressively blander and less inspiring than the one before it. Wicca! Not nasty old badly-behaved witchcraft but a shiny modern Religion, safe and sanitary and approved for veterans and convicts and suburbanites and teenagers alike! Not some stodgy old hidebound thing with rules and regulations, but a real do-it-yourself Spirituality to be made and remade as your whimsy takes you. Wicca! Easily found on a hundred websites with sparkle text and spinning pentacles, shared by a hundred youthful elders quick to assure you that there was no right or wrong way to be Wiccan. And anyone with a dialup connection and a Geocities account was well on their way to the priesthood. Wicca!

I’ll admit, the word was making me twitch before I was even an initiate—hell, before I’d even set foot in an Outer Court circle. I had some books. They seemed so safe. Colorful and inoffensive and about as mysterious as the local Vacation Bible School. I wanted Mystery. I wanted THE OCCULT. Feel-good fluff had its comforting appeal, but it was not in my nature to be satisfied with the superficial. I wanted WITCHCRAFT, brooms and bats and pointed hats, spooky and special and more like the stuff in those exploitative little paperbacks from long ago in the 60s and 70s. I ended up first as a solitary practicing a half-assed homegrown Egyptian paganism, but I still held out hope for the Craft. WITCHcraft!

I stumbled into it, rather by accident, around the time That Word was exploding everywhere. Wicca! OK, fine, Wicca it is, then—as long as it’s being used more as a safeword for Actual Witchcraft. I got in. I was initiated. And I was Initiated as a Witch, not a Wiccan (I was paying attention!)—that overused and mispronounced term did not appear anywhere in the proceedings. But of course, the two were forevermore linked.

Skipping over the years between then and now, and you’ll find that I’m about as averse to the term now as I ever was, though I’m slowly desensitizing myself to it. (These days it’s also fashionable to be very anti-Wiccan among the skulls-for-your-craefte traditionalists, but that’s not really me, either.) My practice is rooted in the stock that was the early template for all the Wiccas to come after it, no matter how diluted they became. If I told you that I cast a quartered circle, used specific tools, made specific invocations, etc., you’d look at me and say “oh, you’re Wiccan.” Well, fuck it, I guess I am, if you look at it that way; but I will always think of myself as a Witch, and only grudgingly concede the upstart, sanitized term.

You’re going to find the two words used interchangeably, especially by older traditional folk. If you look to my Recommended Reading page, you’ll see both Witchcraft and Wicca in the titles. I can read and enjoy books that use “Wicca” predominantly or exclusively, and I can even see myself and my Craft there. I’m desensitizing. Trying not to come off as a complete asshole while still maintaining the distinction between the kind of “Wicca” that I practice (initiatory, oathbound, esoteric, occult) and the kind that I do not (eclectic, open, exoteric).

It’s the 21^st century now, and those spinning-pentacle sites are long gone, replaced by the rabid wolverines of Tumblr and the fabulously photogenic Insta-witches. I’m not sure what the founders of this feast—say, Gardner or Valiente, for example—would make of all this; but I am sure there’s room for all of us beneath the moon-drenched sky, no matter what words we prefer to claim.