Wicca and Witchcraft are not the same thing. Wicca is a form of Witchcraft, just as Mormon is a form of Christianity. Not all Christians follow Joseph Smith's book of Mormon, just as not all people who practice forms of Witchcraft are Wiccan.
Where does this misconception, that all Witchcraft is Wicca stem from? Authors and people just new to Wicca, the Occult, Witchcraft, and so on. Just like when you hear born again Christians, the new entry ones who don't know jack about their own religion, going around saying "if it wasn't for Jesus, you wouldn't be here." my response "umm, no... if it wasn't for God I wouldn't be here. The Christ and God are two different things my deluded friend." You usually hear new Wiccans saying, they stole this, and this is ours and that's ours. Pretty much every religion that's not Christian, that worships a Goddess of one form or another has to be some form of the Original Wicca.
How does this misconception come about? Well I will show you, via quoting a book:
Soraya's Book of Spells, page 25 under "Is Wicca a new religion" and the quote is as follows:
"Wicca or paganism is not a religion at all. Wicca is a Goddess based belief system that can be dated back 25,000 years."
Now I will pull this apart, just to show you the problems with this quote.
1. "Wicca or paganism" - The terms Wicca and Paganism, just like the terms Wicca and Witchcraft, are not one in the same. Wicca is merely a form of Neo-Paganism. The modern definition for the word Pagan, is someone that is not of the mainstream faiths, which are "Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hindi". I'm pretty sure the Zoroastrians don't follow Wiccan practices, and their a pagan religion.
2. "is not a religion at all." - Well in one part she is right, Paganism is not a religion, it's a term to define a whole lot of religions, but Wicca itself is a religion. Though in the Gardnerian Book of Shadows it says you are supposed to not claim Wicca as a religion, rather say all witchcraft is evil. The structure of Wicca itself, is what classes it as a religion.
3. "Wicca is a Goddess based belief system" - NO! *SLAP* NO! BAD MONKEY! Wicca is not just Goddess based, sure there were, and probably still are, the feminist Dianic Wiccans who removed the God, for what ever reason, but I don't consider it Wicca, so it is not of too much concern. Why not? because Wicca was about balance, and its main representation of this was in its deities. Having a High Priestess and High Priest, who was the High Priest meant to be acting out in the Great Rite, if there was no male deity. All summed up: Wicca has a Goddess and a God. Not just one or the other.
4. "that can be dated back 25,000 years." - Really? Wow... 25,000? Really? I'm pretty sure the 1950's weren't that long ago. Gerald Gardner created Wicca in the 1950's just after the laws against Witchcraft in England were lifted. He claimed his religion "Wicca" to be from a secret Witch Cult which survived the burning times and so on. The Scholars then took to Wicca, and pulled it to pieces finding the truth about this, apparently "Old" religion, finding his texts to be influenced by English and Celtic Folk-lore, the Enochian system of John Dee, Thelema, the Golden Dawn, Stregaria, Tantric Yoga, the King James Version of the Holy Bible and even Kipling. The rest was made up by him as he went along, and was estimated to be wrote between 1949 and 1961.
I know this really rips the undies of new Wiccans. Their eyes unwillingly pried open, trust me it hurts, it happened to me. I spent six months researching what I believe to be Wicca only to find a website, which no longer exists called "WhyWiccansSuck" it broke my heart, but as I researched its claims, I quickly found it to be true.
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Craft of the Wise
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