Wicca

Wicca is a form of neopaganism associated with witchcraft. The official history states that Wicca was handed down through an arcane route to via the  in 1936, and in World War II the coven he was involved in was part of "Operation Cone of Power" in which "hundreds of witches from covens throughout southern England gathered skyclad in New Forest to send Hitler and his generals telepathic thoughts to stay out of England." Many modern researchers are doubtful of the existence of the New Forest Coven.

History and divisions
Many forms of wicca claim descent from Gardner or the later publicity-hungry warlock Alex Sanders, but there is also a wide spectrum of what is called "traditional witchcraft", which isn't traditional at all, but comprises people who reject Gardnerian and Alexandrian wicca and claim to have some other secret ancient knowledge.

Gardnerian Wicca
In reality the first Wiccan coven was the founded by Gerald Gardner some time around 1946 with his Rosicrucian friend  as High Priestess. Due to the nudity involved in early Wiccan rituals, the coven used the Fiveacres Naturist Club (also owned by Gardner) as their venue and cover. Other than nudity, the rituals also involved tying up initiates, and then scourging them to raise energy, a practice that is either BDSM-related or is one of the ways available for an asthmatic like Gardner to "enter an ecstatic state" that doesn't involve either incense or dancing. Gardner constructed Wicca as an initiatory and mystery religion, one in which people must be initiated and promise not to reveal hidden secrets. This makes it much cooler.

Shortly after the was repealed, Gardner became much more public with his coven, causing the publicity shy Dafo to leave. Doreen Valiente became high priestess of the Bricket Wood coven. She quickly realised that Gardner's Book of Shadows was an incoherent mess cribbed from sources like the Freemasons, Aleister Crowley, and even Rudyard Kipling's poetry, at which point Gardner "admitted" that instead of a complete Book of Shadows he only had fragmentary parts and he'd interpolated with other sources. Valiente asked for and received permission to re-write parts of the book, cutting much of the work of Crowley, re-writing The Charge of the Goddess into something more readable, and adding most of the poetry.

In 1957, fed up with even more publicity seeking by Gardner, Valiente suggested that there should be rules for the coven to abide by. Gardner's response was to, from nowhere, produce the a sexist document ("as a man loveth a woman by mastering her") that (check your irony meters) threatened Wiccans with Christian hell for breaking them. This was too blatant even for Gardner's coven, most of whom walked out on him for that stunt - but Gardner's fame was sufficient that Gardnerian Wicca continues and operates with the 30 Laws he introduced.

Alexandrian Wicca
Alex Sanders was a relentless self-publicist with an interest in Wicca, who called himself "King of the Witches" (and claimed to be a descendant of ). Before his involvement in Wicca, Alex Sanders had worked as a medium for spiritualist churches, and had some experience of Ceremonial Magic. He claimed (in a possibly apocryphal story) to have been initiated into witchcraft in 1933 by his grandmother nicking his scrotum with a small sickle shaped knife. He used his fame and notoriety to teach classes on Witchcraft, and to found his own tradition referred to as Alexandrian Wicca. Alexandrian Wicca is much more eclectic than Gardnerian Wicca, and includes elements of Ceremonial Magic and much else, and to Gardner's 30 Witch Laws, Alex Sanders added a further 130.

In 1961, he wrote to Gardnerian High Priestess claiming to have an affinity for the Occult and to have experienced second sight. In September 1962, he succeeded in convincing the Manchester Evening News to run a front-page article on Wicca, leading to him losing his job and the Crowthers refusing to initiate him. This didn't prevent him from claiming he'd been an initiate for a year — and he was finally initiated to the first degree in Gardnerian Wicca in 1963.

Only two years after he was actually initiated he claimed 1,623 initiates in 100 covens, who apparently elected him to the title of King of the Witches. He also made many other claims best described as dubious, including angels telling him to take a job where he could borrow and illicitly copy a book, creating a spirit baby by means of ritual masturbation that "made" him insult people, and having another familiar who was supposedly the name of a Warlock persecuted in the but is in fact fictional.

His pursuit of publicity led to him appearing in a number of films, mostly in the genre of, exploitation movies presented as documentaries but mixing fact and fiction freely. These included appearances in Late Show London (1966), Twenty-four Hours (1970), and Secret Rites (1971). His wife Maxine Sanders was also a prominent witch in similar circles, including the Coven of the Stag King in London; the couple were handfasted in 1965 and legally wed in 1968, before breaking up in 1973.

Dianic Wicca
Dianic Wicca is a splinter sect initially founded by Z Budapest, commonly associated with the Goddess movement. Dianics do not believe in a masculine deity (or deities), believing instead in the principles of the Sacred Feminine. It is extremely strongly associated with TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminism, transmisogyny, and actual misandry (as opposed to "misandry" as used by MRAs). At one witchy event, 2011 PantheaCon, they banned trans women from taking part, and they have stated on their website that only cis women can join; however there are trans-inclusive offshoots of Dianic Wicca including the Amazon Priestess Tribe and the McFarland Dianic tradition (founded by Morgan McFarland). Many Wiccans do not believe Dianic Wicca is true Wicca. See the main page on the subject for more details.

Church and School of Wicca
The Church and School of Wicca was founded by Gavin and Yvonne Frost in 1968 and teaches Wicca and other occult subjects such as Practical Sorcery, Tantric Yoga, and in correspondence courses. The Frosts call what they teach "Celtic Wicca" mostly due to a mountain of half-baked cultural appropriation.

Georgian Wicca
Georgian Wicca is not recognised as part of mainstream Wicca despite some popularity because it is an eclectic reinvention and can not trace its lineage back to one of the English covens of the Alexandrean and Gardnerian traditions. Yes, even Wiccans have this form of dispute.

Fluffbunny Wicca
Despite the fact that Wicca is a mystery religion with complex rites and in the root tradition has multiple degrees of initiation, some people (notably readers of Silver Ravenwolf) think that Wicca is an excuse to make things up as they go along. These people are known as fluffbunnies and even more annoying to the average witch than the average rationalist.

Seax-Wica
Seax-Wica, the American branch of Wicca, was founded by Raymond Buckland. Unlike many other offshoots of Wicca, Buckland was initiated by Wicca-founder Gerald Gardner. He later founded Seax-Wica as a variation, allowing for self-initiation (although still considered non-preferable), and making nudity in rituals optional. Unlike many founders of various branches of Wicca who engaged in some well-publicized rivalries (...we're looking at you, Alex "King of the Witches" Sanders), Buckland did not let his ego get completely out of control, and tried to generally be open to other forms of Wicca and paganism, with a general attitude of "whatever works for you." In fact, when writing The Complete Book of Witchcraft (often called "The big blue book" by those in the Craft) he sent a request to the leaders of various branches of Wicca to send him information on their practices, so he could include a brief description of each "path" in the Appendices.

Buckland suffered from no delusions that supernatural healing was a substitute for doctors. He gave disclaimers that he was not a physician when giving advice on herbalism, and specifically instructed his readers to keep their health-insurance.

Raymond Buckland's books include The Magick of Chant-O-Matics (Parker, 1978 hardcover; Prentice-Hall, 2002 softcover), which suggests that chanting the following will make you rich🇱🇮:

Need need need / money money money / me me me / money money money / now now now / money money money

Another of his books is the novel Mu Revealed, a satire on the writings of pseudoscience writer James Churchward, written under the pseudonym "Tony Earll" (an anagram for "Not Really").

Stregheria
Stregheria (from an archaic Italian word for witchcraft) is a form of wicca based in Italian tradition, found both in Italy and among Italian-Americans. A founding figure was Raven Grimassi, who as a young man in 1969 claimed to be a practitioner of Gardnerian Wicca in San Diego, having moved there from near Naples; in fact he had made much of it up and it had little relationship with Gardner's practices. He later claimed to be practising a pre-Christian pagan religion deriving from ancient Etruscan religious practices. Following Grimassi, stregherian wiccans typically worship a dyad of gods, such as a Moon Goddess and Horned God, although these go by various names. Grimassi suggested his religion was a form of pagan reconstructionism based on Italian family traditions, but the evidence for this is slender and there is some dispute over whether he claimed to have been practising a family religion comprising his family's own traditions or (when it became clear his family weren't pagans) whether he was just doing something that was maybe done by some family somewhere.

Solo Practitioners
A self-taught Wiccan without a coven who's researched from books is called a Solo Practitioner or Solitary Wiccan, though many Wiccans, particularly traditional Gardnerians, get really pissy if anyone not in a traditional coven uses the term Wicca. They are also irritated by the tendency to refer to "New Age" ideas as part of Wicca (something that is a hallmark of fluffbunnies). Nevertheless, covenless solo practitioners are probably very common, due to the wide availability of books of varying authority on Wiccan practice.

Beliefs
Wiccans usually believe that the world is divided into two planes, a magical plane and an earthly plane. Most believe in a God (often a Horned God) and a counteracting Goddess much akin to yin and yang. A common tenet is that "whatever you send away in either plane will come back to you."

Wiccan ethics are summed up in the Wiccan Rede, a pithy, archaically phrased statement that reads Doreen Valiente's combination of the Golden Rule and Aleister Crowley's "Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," or in other words a restatement of John Stuart Mill's harm principle. There is also a widespread belief in "threefold return" - the karma-like concept that your actions will come back on you three times (or three times more, or in three different ways - it's all a bit woolly). Attempts to reconcile this with the laws of conservation of energy may give rise to headaches. Three headaches, even.

Some humanists find it a very nice summation of ethics without divine principles in general - though they'd most certainly have a problem with the magic and certain beliefs of the Earth-worshiping hippie nonsense variety. Luckily nearly all Wiccan groups have abandoned the idea of the "curse of the Goddess" - a divine punishment for homosexuality.

Wicca is claimed as a derivative of the word "Witta," a supposed Gaelic term meaning "wise one." But some silly writers have tried to claim it is Anglo-Saxon for "front". The actual etymology is very straightforward. Wicca/wicce is the Anglo-Saxon word for "witch". In case you didn't spot it: that "cc" in "wicce" is pronounced as a "ch"-sound, not a "k"-sound, in Old English. Both "wicca" (masc.) and "wicce" (fem.) derive from a verb meaning "to practice witchcraft" (also the source of the modern verb "to bewitch"), which in turn may possibly derive from a Germanic root meaning "change", though this is uncertain.