The Genesis Of Modern Wiccan Spirituality
In 1954, a former British civil servant called Gerald Gardner proclaimed that he had received initiation into an ancient nature religion which had survived from pre-Christian European paganism. The practitioners of Gardner’s religion were using the name New Forest Coven. Gardner launched an effort to reinvigorate and revive the witchcraft religion by putting together a book named “Witchcraft Today,” where he tried to reconstruct the recovered fragments of religious ceremony and belief from the New Forest Coven.
Gardner designated the spiritual tradition as “witchcraft,” and called its practitioners “the Wica.” He maintained that this latter term came to him from senior initiates of the Coven, and that its use was what led him to consider the possibility that the “Old Religion” might still be in existence. Gardner believed, like most current academics, that this term came from the Old English term “wicca,” which is the etymological predecessor to the contemporary term “witch.”
There has been a bit of argument as to the accuracy of his idea that he was resurrecting an ancient, matriarchal, original European religion. A few claimants have argued that Gardner had just invented the teachings of witchcraft, compiling fragments of some known archaic spiritual systems and from modern occult practices as needed. Be that as it may, the majority of academics are agreed that Gardner made his assertions with no intention of deceiving. It is widely accepted that Gardner was actually initiated into an early 20th-century revival of the original witchcraft that Gardner had sought, rather than a fully genuine survival of an ancient European religious tradition.
Regardless of the fact that he
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