Why Most Practitioners Now Work Alone

Surveys of modern Pagans conducted since the 1990s, including large community surveys run by Pagan federations and academic researchers such as Helen Berger's long-running study of American Pagans, have consistently found solitary practitioners to be the clear majority, typically well over half of self-identified Witches and Pagans, against a minority who belong to any coven at all. The shift is generally traced to two developments arriving together.

Scott Cunningham's 1988 book Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner was written explicitly to give a full working system, sabbats, tools, spellcraft and a self-dedication rite, to a reader with no coven and no prospect of finding one, and its enormous and sustained sales figures are themselves evidence of how much demand existed for exactly that. The internet arrived at almost the same historical moment, giving isolated practitioners access to a much wider range of published and shared material than any single coven could offer, and later removing even the need for a physical book. Initiatory covens generally do not regard a self-dedication performed alone as equivalent to a coven initiation conferred by an existing initiate, holding that something is transmitted person to person that a solo rite cannot supply, a position solitary practitioners themselves frequently accept without treating it as a problem, since most describe seeking a personal and largely private practice rather than standing within an inherited lineage in the first place.