The spiritual part of Wicca stems mostly from the core beliefs of ancient nature religions, and the practice of magick has its origins in both shamanic practice and the ceremonial magick of the Middle Ages. Together, they weave the rich tapestry that is modern Wicca. However, this blending was not simple, and our history is complicated.
The Misty History Of Witchcraft
Many thousands of years ago, our ancestors were hunters and gatherers living a precarious existence in close connection with the weather, the seasons, the land, the sea, and the other animals.
They worshiped the earth and, we believe, the great Mother Goddess embodied in the earth. Later, they began to worship as well the male principle, personified in the gods. Because they were hunters and relied on wild animals for food, they created beautiful images of bison, antelope, and wild horses, both to honor the prey and to ensure success in the hunt.
Yet when we look at the religious life of Paleolithic humans, what emerges is the vast scope of our ignorance. We have no written accounts of their lives and beliefs. We have oral traditions from surviving indigenous tribes, which might or might not bear any resemblance to our ancient ancestors’ traditions. We have cave paintings and no way to see into the minds of the artists, who have been dust for a thousand generations. We have a few stone tools and bone carvings, a few caves and graves.
Let’s look at one type of Paleolithic artifact: the so-called “Venus figures,” little carved statues of busty, round women that were scattered around Europe twenty or thirty thousand years ago. We don’t know what they meant to the makers: dolls for children, fertility talismans, Paleolithic pin-up girls for lusty adolescent males, or images of a great Mother Goddess? We don’t know.
All we can know for certain is what they mean to us. And to us, they are perfect personifications of Gaia, Mother Earth, our fertile and abundant planet, source of life and sustenance. We intuit that they were the same for our ancient ancestors…but that’s not scientific evidence.
We do know that over the millennia more gods and goddesses were added, and each tribe personified Deity in their own way. By the time of the Roman Empire, many Pagan religions coexisted; all had numerous gods, both female and male, who held sway over the many aspects of the natural world: deities of earth, sea, and sky, of the sun and moon and stars.
Blessed be!
One of the ways Witches remind themselves and each other that everything and everyone is sacred, is by saying “Blessed be!” It means thou art blessed. It is often used to say goodbye, sometimes to say hello, and as a way of saying yes or inserted when a Christian might say amen; for instance, as a general blessing and the closing words of a ritual.
The dorset ooser
A few relics of the Old Religion still exist in Europe, such as the horns of the morris dancers. One artifact was called the “Dorset Ooser.” It was a wooden mask of the Hornéd God, complete with bull horns, passed down for generations within the Cave family of Dorset. Apparently, it was worn by a dancer dressed in animal skins, in village celebrations around the Winter Solstice. Such a relic would be priceless to any museum today. Unfortunately, a mysterious stranger bought it from a family servant in about 1897, and it hasn’t been seen since.
All the Pagan faiths overlapped. The gods and goddesses of different lands traveled with merchants and migrations, met and mixed and intermarried. As far as we can tell, religious differences were not usually considered a reason for war. Men might go to battle for grazing land, for cattle, or for access to fresh water—but not because their gods had different names and images. Before Egypt and Sumer and the art of writing, nothing is documented, so we can’t be certain of much.
The Norse Eddas give us a glimpse of the northern Pagan faiths. Druidry, a totally oral tradition, has only the descriptions left by Julius Caesar and a few other Romans, who were not only from a different faith but the ones who annihilated them. (In the year 60 CE, a final attack by the Roman legions broke the power of the Druids at the island of Mona in Wales, though they may have lingered in Ireland for a few more centuries.)
And what about Witches, or our spiritual forebears, by whatever name they called themselves? They also had a non-literate, oral tradition—the folkway of the common people. We have bits and pieces passed down through family tradition, or “famtrad,” Witches. We have legends and tales gathered by folklorists. We have masks and carvings and artifacts with no colorful pamphlets to explain them.
In 325 CE, Emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be the official faith of the Roman Empire. The new faith began to spread over Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Africa.
There is evidence that early Christianity and Paganism co-existed in some places. The Culdee Church in Ireland was a happy blend of Jesus lore and traditional folk religion until Rome put an end to it. Early Christian churches in Britain had stone phalluses on the altars, Green Men and sheela-na-gig goddesses on the walls, and special doors in the north walls for the Pagans to join in the services (north was a holy direction for Pagans).
This friendly interlude did not last. The Roman Church gained political power and went to war against the Pagans, overthrowing the Old Gods and setting up their own altars on the ancient sacred sites. The Old Norse faiths fought a rearguard action for a thousand years, but they too gradually succumbed.
In the countryside, many folks still quietly followed the old ways. They honored
