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Wicca (English: / ˈ w ɪ k ə /), also known as "The Craft", [1] is a modern pagan, syncretic, earth-centered religion.Considered a new religious movement by scholars of religion, the path evolved from Western esotericism, developed in England during the first half of the 20th century, and was introduced to the public in 1954 by Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant.
However, the 2011 census made it possible to describe oneself as pagan-Wiccan, pagan-Druid and so on. The figures for England and Wales showed 80,153 describing themselves as pagan (or some subgroup thereof). The largest subgroup was Wicca, with 11,766 adherents. [147] The overall numbers of people self-reporting as pagan rose between 2001 and ...
Modern pagan practices tend to be ceremonial and focus on community, whereas New Age practices are concerned primarily with the personal growth of the individual. Some hybrids between modern paganism and New Age have emerged, especially in the United States where they tend to overlap and be connected to the same social change movements.
The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism, a painting by Gustave Doré (1899). Paganism is commonly used to refer to various religions that existed during Antiquity and the Middle Ages, such as the Greco-Roman religions of the Roman Empire, including the Roman imperial cult, the various mystery religions, religious philosophies such as Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and more localized ethnic ...
Paganism has broadly connoted the "religion of the peasantry". [1] [5] During and after the Middle Ages, the term paganism was applied to any non-Christian religion, and the term presumed a belief in "false gods". [6] [7] The origin of the application of the term "pagan" to polytheism is debated. [8]
The 2014 Pew Research Center's Religious Landscapes Survey included a subset of the New Age Spiritual Movement called "Pagan or Wiccan," reflecting that 3/4 of individuals identifying as New Age also identified as Pagan or Wiccan and placing Wiccans and Pagans at 0.3% of the total U.S. population or approximately 956,000 people of just over ...
The word "witchcraft" is over a thousand years old: Old English formed the compound wiccecræft from wicce ('witch') and cræft ('craft'). [32] The masculine form was wicca ('male sorcerer'). [33] According to the Oxford English Dictionary, wicce and wicca were probably derived from the Old English verb wiccian, meaning 'to practice witchcraft ...
This emphasis can be seen in the Sabbat rituals, which focus on the relationship between the Wiccan Goddess and God. As compared to Gardnerian Wicca, Alexandrian Wicca is "somewhat more eclectic", according to The Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism. [3] Maxine Sanders notes that Alexandrians take the attitude "If it works use it ...