Tradition
Wicca
A modern initiatory religion centred on a goddess and a horned god, an eight-festival ritual year, and a system of three initiatory degrees, publicly emerging in mid-twentieth-century England through the writings of Gerald Gardner.
Wicca is a modern initiatory religion that emerged publicly in England in 1954 with the publication of Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today. It is duotheistic in structure, centred on a goddess and a horned god, and organises ritual life around an eight-festival annual cycle (the Wheel of the Year) of solar and seasonal observances.
Initiatory Wicca operates in small autonomous covens through three degrees of initiation, with lineage traced from a chain of validating initiators. Eclectic, solitary, and self-initiated practice expanded rapidly from the 1980s onward and now constitutes the majority of self-identified Wiccans, although it stands at some distance from the initiatory tradition from which the religion originally derives.
