Eclectic Solitary Wicca

Eclectic solitary Wicca has no founder, no founding date and no organisation, and any account that supplies one is wrong. It is what happened when a religion transmitted by initiation met a mass paperback market.

The practitioner works alone, assembles a practice from published sources, and typically marks the beginning of it with a self-dedication rather than an initiation conferred by anyone else. There is no coven, no oath, no lineage, and nobody to ask. There is also, by construction, no orthodoxy: an eclectic practice may draw on Gardnerian ritual structure, on Celtic or Norse or Egyptian names, on ceremonial magic, herbalism, tarot, and whatever else the practitioner finds it useful to work with.

This is now, by a very large margin, the way most self-identified Wiccans practise. It is what the word means to most of the people who use it about themselves.

The published self-initiation rite goes back to Paul Huson's Mastering Witchcraft of 1970, and Doreen Valiente and others followed. The book that made the category is Scott Cunningham's Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner, published in 1988, which had sold over four hundred thousand copies by 2000 and told its reader, in plain language, that they could simply begin. Silver RavenWolf and a long line of others followed the model, and the internet, from the mid-1990s, removed the last barrier to entry.

None of this was planned by anyone, and no initiatory body authorised it. It happened because demand exceeded the supply of initiators by several orders of magnitude, and a printing press was available.

The initiatory traditions and the eclectics have been arguing about the word for forty years, and the argument is genuine rather than merely territorial.

The British Traditional position is that Wicca names a specific initiatory mystery religion, founded by Gardner and transmitted by degree from a person who holds it, and that a religion whose material is oathbound cannot, by definition, be acquired from a book. On this view eclectic practice is neopagan witchcraft, which is a perfectly respectable thing to be, and calling it Wicca empties the word of content.

The eclectic position is that a religion belongs to the people who practise it, that the initiatory claim to the name rests on a lineage whose own origin story failed historical examination, and that gatekeeping a word is a poor use of anyone's time.

Underneath sit two real questions. Can a self-dedication do what an initiation does, if what an initiation does is transmit something from one person to another? And is a mystery religion still a mystery religion once its mysteries are on a shelf in a chain bookshop?

Neither side has conceded, and the practical outcome has been settled by numbers rather than by argument. The eclectics are the overwhelming majority, the word means in ordinary speech what they use it to mean, and the initiatory lineages have largely stopped contesting the usage in public while continuing to make the distinction among themselves.

It is worth noting that both sides accept the historical findings about Gardner. What they disagree about is what follows from them.

There is no reliable count. Census and survey figures for Wicca and paganism exist in several countries and are not broken down by tradition, so the number of eclectic solitary practitioners cannot be extracted from them, and figures offered for it are guesses. What the general figures do show is that pagan self-identification grew substantially through the 1990s and 2000s in Britain, the United States, Australia and Canada, and that the growth was overwhelmingly in unaffiliated practice rather than in covens.

The distribution of the practice has followed its distribution channels. Cunningham's generation of authors reached readers through bookshops; the 1990s brought television and film treatments that produced a visible wave of teenage practitioners; the internet brought forums, then blogs, then, from the 2010s, short-form video, which is now where a great deal of transmission happens and where its quality is least controlled.

Two consequences are worth naming. The first is that eclectic practice has drifted a long way from Wicca as Gardner left it, absorbing material from traditions with living communities who did not consent to the borrowing, and the resulting arguments about appropriation are among the sharpest in contemporary paganism. The second is that a religion without institutions has no mechanism for correcting bad information, and a great deal of what circulates (including confident claims of ancient survival, and the nine-million figure for the witch trials, which is false), has proved impossible to dislodge.