How old is Wicca?

Question

I would like to know yur views on the subject. Please tell me how old you think or know Wicca the religion is?

I personaly think its over 30,000 years old.

Answer 1

Didn't you already ask this?

It's a new religion. As has been already stated, Gardner started Wicca around the 20's or 30's, based on Ceremonial Magick, Thelema, Hermeticism, British folk traditions, and the Anthropological theories of the time. But Garnder wasn't the only one who created a Witchcraft religion and claimed that it was ancient. There were several other people doing about the same thing at around the same time, and that is where we get "Traditional Witchcraft." But it's all new, as are the other Pagan religions such as Druidism, Asatru, Hellenic Paganism. All new. That is why we call it Neopaganism, or Neopagan Reconstructionism. I define "Wicca" as those traditions which are duotheistic, use a Ceremonial Magick ritual structure, celebrate eight seasonal sabbats, and are derived from the movement stared by Gerald Gardber. I define "Reconstructionist" as a more scholarly attempt to reconstruct the Old Religions based on scholarship, archeology, and comparative studies of other religions. There is no unbroken line. The Old Religions died, and then we came along and reinvented them. We need to have the intellectual honesty to admit that -- we owe it to ourselves, to future generations, and to our ancestors and founders. That doesn't make these religions any less valid or real. It's a new religious movement, less than a hundred years old, and that's OK. The spirit of Paganism is eternal, an ancient part of the Human Spirit going back to the dawn of time. But our modern interpretation of it is new.

Answer 2

30,000 years is... way off.
It's more than likely that 30,000 years ago, people viewed the Earth and the Great Mother of all living things. Shamans would prey that a tribe's hunters would be successful in a hunt. The full moon was seen as a time of wildness in Nature and there was a reason to pray for the sun on Winter Solstice to bring a fruitful spring and summer.
Even though these themes are present in Wicca, it doesn't make Wicca the "Old Religion" as Gardner claimed it to be. It's not a revival of an unchanging tradition that's been passed down for hundreds of years.
Gardner was just introduced to an old "witch cult" in New Forest which is... somewhere near Christchurch. And from there practices he threw in elements of Thelema and ceremonial magick, Freemasonery, Rosicrucianism, stuff from The Key of Solomon, and writings from Rudyard Kipling and Charles Godfrey Leland. There's even a bit of Eastern philosophy thrown into the mix. It's a reconstruction of old folklore and tradition, not a revival in the slightest.
So... Wicca is really a young religion. About 50 years old. Sure, there are grains of old pagan traditions thrown into one eclectic stew of a religion, but just because the belief system has some themes and ideas that can be traced way back doesn't make Wicca an "Old Religion."

Answer 3

1. Wicca was invented about 50 years ago by an English witch named Gerald Gardner. He borrowed some ideas from ancient Celtic spirituality, took some ideas from occult "guru" Aleister Crowley, and invented the rest out of whole cloth. Although he claimed it was an authentic religion passed down secretly for generations, there is no evidence to support this view.

2. If human beings had religion 30'000 years ago it was either something more akin to animism in which it is thought that everything in nature as some sort of spirit or something akin to pantheism in which it is believed that nature and the universe are themselves divine. The idea of the universe being created and ruled over by divine beings of some sort is a much more recent development only about 5 or 10 thousand years old.

Answer 4

The word and beliefs are old. The codified religion is but a child in years, even now.

English going back to the 14th century had several words Wicce, Wicche, Wice, Wyce, Wich, Wych, and Wyche, Wichene but not the modern word Wicca. However, with no printing presses to conform words, spelling was rather a freestyle art rather than a discipline. Any of the above might have been the seminal word for Wicca because all had to do with Magick and wisdom.The crafts were called Wichdome.

Here is a bit of a poem from that time.

So they lad hym wyth trecherye,
Wyth Wychdome and wyth sorcerye

Answer 5

Witchcraft is indeed centuries old and predates all of today's religious systems. However, "Wicca" itself is a belief system cobbled together by Gerald Gardner in the 1940's and 1950's. So, it's still quite new.

Answer 6

Wicca is around 70 years old. Why could we declare it became older? Older does no longer recommend extra appropriate! we've documented Gardnerian stuff from the Nineteen Forties, human beings. no person, no longer even Gardner's Wiccans, referred to as themselves Wiccan, with an n, till the Sixties. certainly, British classic Witches spurned the be conscious Wiccan, in desire of the be conscious Witch, precise up in the process the early Nineties, touching on people who used the be conscious Wiccans as poseurs and claiming Wicca became suggested Weesha. With the attractiveness of Wicca interior the Nineties, a lot of those comparable British classic Witches now desire to declare the be conscious they spurned and label those they earlier referred to as Wiccan as "Neo-Wiccan." ...and those individuals who have been there for the preliminary spurning of the term "Wiccan" snigger of their faces. those sensible females and adult males of the long previous, earlier Wicca, via ways, did no longer call themselves Witches, Wiccans or Wica.... religiously, maximum of them have been Christians, training between the 1000's of varieties of Christian magic. Edit: And "Witta" became invented interior the Nineties via Edain McCoy and is a shown, demonstrable hoax. Edit: Witta (and wita) isn't pronouncable in any Celtic language. no longer the p-celtic languages, no longer the q-celtic languages. The languages lack the two the W and the double t. look it up.

Answer 7

Nope. Read more.

Wicca was formalized by Gerald Gardner in England around 1953. He claimed to have been following it since 1939. Opinions vary.

However, it does draw *elements* of its beliefs and practices from much earlier folkways, and evidence of goddess worship (but NOT some *universal* Cult of the Great Goddess™) goes way, way back.

Answer 8

people used to argue this rather often, it's more commonly accepted that Wicca itself is about 6 decades old (Gardner coined the term.) but witchcraft itself, and many of the principals of the basis for Wicca, are very timeless.

Answer 9

The practice of witchcraft is as old as concious humanity. Wicca is only about 70 years old.

Answer 10

It was created back in the 50's, but the pagan basis for it is millenniums old. There's debate that the movements started in the 20's in England.