A Brief History of Wicca
By Joy J. Fine
The history of Wicca is not a new one and neither is the religion that it is bound to. The term Wicca is a much older term used to mean witchcraft. The fact is that Wicca has been around for hundreds of years and has gone from a prevalent practice amongst people to one that needed to be practiced only on the quiet for fear of reprisals. The Middle Ages was a good time for those who practiced Wicca. It was a time when they were accepted, even encouraged. Those who were interested in the religion were initiated into it. It was not simply a group to join. You had to be invited in and to accept of your own free will.
Those who practiced Wicca did not see things as good and evil. There was balance instead. That meant that they believed in tolerance, and the assumption that there is not one lone truth. What may be true for one person is not necessarily true for another. The history of Wicca tells about the people’s beliefs in the spirits contained within everything. They felt that all of nature must have a god to control what happened; therefore the weather had one as did the water, the sky, the harvest and the hunt. Since many of the animals that were hunted for food were horned animals the god they pictured for this purpose also was horned. Here is the beginning of the story that claims that those who practice Wicca worshiped Satan. This is not true.
Over time the practice of Wicca spread throughout Europe and until Christianity itself was spreading, it remained an acceptable religion to be practiced like any other. But, when Christianity was trying to spread across Europe the pope of the time, Gregory the Great, used the fear of those practicing Christianity to pull more worshipers close to the church while trying to trample the Wiccan religion. Oddly if you research the history of Wicca you will not only discover that they did not worship Satan, but that the very name given to this evil was used because of an error in translation from the Hebrew word Ha-Satan and the Greek word Diabolos. Both of these words actually meant opponent, adversary or enemy but they were twisted and given a different interpretation.
But it was in the late fourteen hundreds that Pope Innocent Vlll began the persecution of all who practiced Wicca. His words began a period of over three hundred years that saw nine million people murdered for being witches and devil worshipers. This was a time when you either allowed yourself to be converted to Christianity or you were denounced as someone who worshiped Satan. There was only one god to worship and the Christians were going to make sure it was theirs. This persecution spread throughout Europe like fire across a field of dry grass. It saw people use it to get rid of those they feared or hated by claiming they were witches. It spread to the United States where the Salem witch hunts became infamous.
When looking further into the history of Wicca one sees that after the devastation that the witch hunts caused those who practiced Wicca kept a low profile. They still practiced their beliefs but did so quietly. They supported women’s rights; sexual freedoms of all kinds including homosexuality, abortion and most strongly the elimination of Christianity from the schools and the government. Could these strong beliefs be why there were laws against witchcraft in many countries, some of which were only recently taken off the books?
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