Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today in 1954, three years after the repeal of the Witchcraft Act had removed the most direct legal risk to public discussion of witchcraft practice in Britain. The book presented what Gardner described as a surviving pre-Christian witch religion, organized in covens, centered on the worship of a horned god and a goddess, and structured around a ritual calendar of seasonal festivals, framing the material explicitly within Margaret Murray's witch-cult thesis, which enjoyed considerable scholarly credibility at the time.
Murray herself contributed the book's introduction, lending her academic authority directly to Gardner's presentation and reinforcing the impression that Witchcraft Today documented a genuine historical survival rather than a newly assembled religious system. Gardner wrote carefully around certain ritual details he described as oath bound and therefore not to be published, a rhetorical strategy that both protected specific content and reinforced the sense that Wicca possessed genuine secret tradition rather than an openly authored body of material.
The book found a wider readership than anything previously published on the subject of contemporary witchcraft practice, and it drew significant press and public attention to Gardner personally, who became, almost immediately after its publication, the public face of a religious movement that had previously existed only in small, private circles.