Beliefs & practices

There is no single doctrinal core. Recurring features across the family include: a horned or antlered male deity sometimes named or framed as the Witch Father (Tubal Cain, the Devil of folklore, the Man in Black); a female counterpart less stable in name but typically associated with the moon, the dead, or the dark; reverence for ancestors and for the spirits of place; and a working ritual centred on the sabbath as a visionary or ecstatic event rather than as a fixed liturgical calendar.

Compared with Wicca, traditional craft tends toward greater comfort with the “left-hand” or destructive aspects of magical work, less emphasis on the Wiccan Rede or Threefold Law, and a freer relationship with theistic language: many practitioners are explicitly agnostic about whether the figures they work with exist as discrete entities, as psychological constructs, or as both.