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My first introduction to modern Paganism was through Wicca. Back when I were a lad, in the 1970s, there were very few books on the subject. Fortunately, this meant that a high percentage of them were good. This was before Scott Cunningham, so they were about Traditional Wicca - Neo-Wicca hadn’t been invented yet.
The major difference between Wicca and Neo-Wicca is that the first is an initiatory mystery religion created by Gerald Gardner and some friends in the late 1940s and early 1950s, while Neo-Wicca is an open, free-wheeling religion that essentially started with the publication of Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner in 1988. (Things had been percolating for some time, but it was with Cunningham that the explosion began.) Since then, Neo-Wicca has grown in popularity rapidly, and is what most people think of when they think of Wicca.
These essays are about Traditional Wicca. Gardner wove together some very diverse threads when he created his religion. This is my contribution to their untangling.
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