Wicca: A comprehensive guide to the Old Religion in the modern world. Vivianne Crowley
major branch is the Alexandrian tradition whose members derive their initiation from Alex and Maxine Sanders via a Gardnerian initiatory line. After Gerald’s death in 1964, Alex took over the role of media Witch and successfully publicized the existence of the Craft, not only in England, but also elsewhere in Europe. The two traditions use more or less the same ritual material and have been steadily converging in recent years. The differences are more in ritual style and outlook than anything else. Loosely speaking, the Gardnerians are more Low Church and the Alexandrians more High Church. Alexandrian Witches tend to be more interested in ritual magic than in folk Paganism.
As well as Gardnerian and Alexandrian Craft, there are other traditions that have brought in outsiders. Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca are derived largely from one particular tradition, based in the New Forest area of the South of England; although this has been cross-fertilized by contact with other British traditions. Another important branch of the Craft springs from the Witch known as Robert Cochrane who claimed to have been initiated into a hereditary coven at the age of five and to have become a Magister at the age of 28. He traced his Witchblood back to 1734 and a Traditional coven in the Warwickshire area. In the 1960s he came to know a number of Gardnerian Witches and in the early 1960s he formed a coven with a number of leading occultists of the day. His ideas about the Craft featured in Justine Glass’ book Witchcraft, the Sixth Sense.14 The Cochrane tradition was more male-oriented than Gardnerian Craft and had a stronger emphasis on the agricultural cycle and links with the land.
Gardnerian and Alexandrian Craft have been taken to both the United States and to Canada. The Gardnerian Tradition was taken to the United States in 1964 by Rosemary and Raymond Buckland who founded a flourishing branch of the movement. Some of the ethos of the Gardnerian Tradition evolved differently in the United States than in its English birth-place, in that there has been stricter adherence to the Book of Shadows than is found in English covens. This formalism has had the effect of creating a strong and powerful Gardnerian Wiccan tradition in the United States, something that is not easy to do when transplanting from Europe a tradition rooted in the land. Gardnerian and Alexandrian Craft in Canada has had more contact with English covens and has evolved slightly differently from the United States.
Robert Cochrane died in June 1966, reputedly from an accidental overdose of the amanita mushroom, but covens in Britain and, in the United States, the Roebuck coven, have continued working in the Cochrane tradition. Evan John Jones and Doreen Valiente, authors of Witchcraft: A Tradition Renewed15 and The Rebirth of Witchcraft16 have published work derived from Robert Cochrane but this is rather different from the original and has evolved into a more Goddess-oriented tradition.
America has also developed its own Craft traditions. With its larger population and willingness to try anything new and different, Wicca, like other religious groups in the US, tends to have more sects than in the UK. As well as the Gardnerian, Alexandrian and other traditional groups, new groups appear all the time as people start their own covens and decide to call their particular interpretation of Gardnerian, Alexandrian or other Wicca by a new name. For those who are interested, Margot Adler, a Wiccan priestess and the grand-daughter of the founder of Adlerian psychology, has published a book entitled Drawing Down the Moon17 which gives a comprehensive account of Wicca in the US.
One branch of Wicca that began in the United States is the Dianic Craft which was developed by Morgan McFarland and Hungarian Witch, Zsuzsanna Budapest. This was inspired by the Women’s Movement. Dianic covens have a matriarchal focus. Many exclude men and see their tradition as a sisterhood, as wimmin’s religion. Others work with men, but see their role as less important than that of women. Many Dianic groups worship only the Goddess and those that acknowledge the God see the male deity as a part of the mystery of the Goddess.
A related movement is the feminist Craft, one of whose principal exponents is the American Witch Starhawk. On Samhain (Hallowe’en) 1979 her book The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess18 was published in California. This stimulated the founding of thousands of covens, primarily though not exclusively of women, in the United States and other parts of the world. Starhawk approached the Craft from a different stance to British Wicca which was rooted in both natural magic and in the occult traditions. Starhawk had been initiated into the American Faery Tradition founded by poet Victor Anderson and the bard Gwydion Pedderwen. This borrowed much from Gardnerian Craft practice but favoured a spontaneous ritual approach.
From here, Starhawk’s approach took another turn. Guardianship of the land was a philosophy that the Craft has always espoused. With its roots in an agricultural cycle, the Craft recognized that the survival of humanity depended on the continuing plenitude of the land. The relationship between the Earth and her inhabitants is one of mutual protection and love. This was a very different attitude from that of Christianity and other Near Eastern monotheisms. The Craft, with its emphasis on the Goddess, the Earth, empowerment of women, reverence for the reproductive process and honouring the body, had great appeal for many women, for whom masculine monotheisms seemed anti-feminine, narrow and unwelcoming. The feminist Craft looked outward to the political realm and in particular to two aspects of politics that had become very important in the 1970s onwards – the peace movement and the ecological crisis. The eco-feminist approach has drawn many women and men interested in Green politics to take up Wise-Craft and Goddess religion.
Both the Gardnerian and Alexandrian Traditions have been developed in Continental Europe by people who have sought initiation into the British traditions and have then transplanted them into their own countries, combining the Witch lore which has been preserved in Britain with their own local Wise-craft and Pagan traditions. To seek for esoteric knowledge in the misty isles of the Western seas has a long historical precedent in Europe. Britain, and Ireland beyond, have been considered sacred isles since ancient times and some of the major Druid training colleges in Celtic times were in the British Isles.
In Europe, Wicca spread first to Northern Europe. In Ireland, this was stimulated by the Wiccan authors Janet and Stewart Farrar who settled there some years ago. Gardnerian Wicca was taken to the Netherlands in the 1970s by the Silver Circle, followed by Alexandrian Wicca and the Wiccacentrum Aradia in the 1980s. From the Netherlands, groups have been set up in nearby Belgium. In Germany, although there were Witches before the 1970s, the Craft became more active from the 1970s on, stimulated by German Witches who had contact with Gardnerian covens in England and by American Witches in the US armed forces who were stationed in Germany. Later, in the 1980s, the German Craft movement received new impetus from a series of seminars and lectures given by Alex Sanders in the last years before his death. This resulted in Alex initiating a number of German Witches into the Alexandrian Tradition. Starhawk’s book The Spiral Dance was published in German in 198319 and many eclectic feminist groups sprang from this. The German Craft development was also aided by the publication of Das Hexenbuch20 by a group of Alexandrian initiates. There are now representatives of Alexandrian, Gardnerian, and most of the other large branches of Wicca in Germany. Across Scandinavia, there are flourishing combined Gardnerian and Alexandrian covens, and in France, there is now a small but growing Wiccan movement.
In the Southern hemisphere, there are covens in New Zealand and Australia. There are also Witches in Japan. Australia has the wider selection of groups, with Gardnerian and Alexandrian covens and some covens with other traditional origins. Practising Wicca in New Zealand seems to be relatively straightforward in that the seasonal cycle is not unlike that of Europe. The Australian climate, however, particularly in the Tropical zone, makes following a sabbat cycle developed in Northern Europe rather difficult. Other problems arise in the Southern Hemisphere. Do you celebrate Yule when everyone else in the country is celebrating Christmas or do you celebrate on the shortest day in June? Considerable thought has to be put into making a sensible interpretation of the Sabbat round. An additional problem in both Australia and New Zealand is that Wiccan circles are cast sun-wise or deosil. In the Northern hemisphere, the sun appears to move clockwise, but in the Southern hemisphere it appears to move anti-clockwise. Magical groups in Australia and New Zealand tend to follow the Northern hemisphere practice and to work clockwise, but in Wicca where attuning ourselves to the forces of nature is more important, then the issue is more problematic. Different groups have come to different solutions,