SokeCalkins said:
Sorry to disagree but Wicca is one of the oldest religions. Pre-Dates Catolic, and Most others. Satanic religion is even younger than Catolic dates.
Wicca and the belief of Nature Based Studies started in the days of shaminism.
well, maybe not...
Margot Adler writes:
[If scholarship is redrawing the picture of the Burning Times, it is also reconfiguring the origins of Wicca. Scholars have never accepted the myth of an unbroken Wiccan tradition, and now most Wiccans are being asked to look honestly at their history. In a recent essay in the scholarly neopagan journal Pomegranate, Cat Chapin-Bishop and Peter Bishop observe that modern-day witches often disavow their roots, including connections to Masonic ritual, Aleister Crowley, Yeats and Kipling, the Golden Dawn, Theosophy, spiritualism, and much more. These authors write:
"The fanciful origin myths of Wicca told to us by Margaret Murray, the vastly inflated figure of 9 million dead in the burning times--these have long been discredited, and there is general acceptance now that Wicca is primarily a modern reconstruction of what we think might once have been. "
]
and
Misti Anslin Delaney and Wayland Raven write:
[While some would lay claim to Old Dorothy, (Gardner's Dorothy Clutterbuck) truly, our religion began somewhere between 1939 and 1954 when Gerald Gardner began to synthesize what he had learned from the New Forest Witches with what he had learned of High Magick and ritual from the Masonic Order. It is difficult for historians to agree on how much of Gardner's Witchcraft was made up or co-opted from other mystic and secret societies, and how much may have come from his association with a person he called Dorothy Clutterbuck, who he said was part of a New Forest coven, and one of his first teachers. Dorothy was the person Gerald credited with initiating him into Witchcraft, though for a time her existence was in question.
The religion--if indeed it was a religion, and not a purely a magickal Craft--that Old Dorothy taught to her initiate, Gerald, was the mother of modern Wicca, but it wasn't the same religion. In 1954 Gardner's new religion was introduced in his book, "Witchcraft Today." That Gardner's book was a synthesis of knowledge and wisdom from several sources and not a literal writing of the oral traditions of one famtrad does not lessen the genius of this work. While it may have contained historical fantasy as a backdrop and a rationalization, Gardner was in the process of giving birth to a new religion a religion that has fed the needs of the 21st century.]
