This report item is practical correspondence work rather than a theory of the self: herbs, stones, colors, familiars, and the planetary days and hours. A reading returns the materials and timings a chart lines up with, what to work with and when, and the gods of the Craft a chart's placements answer to. The Craft is a living modern religious tradition, described here rather than sold or instructed.

History

The modern religious movement generally called Wicca, or the Craft, has a well documented founder: Gerald Gardner, who published Witchcraft Today in 1954 presenting the tradition and claiming for it an unbroken lineage back to a surviving pre-Christian pagan witch-cult. That specific lineage claim rests on the Egyptologist Margaret Murray's earlier witch-cult hypothesis of 1921; mainstream historians of the European witch trials have since examined the trial evidence at length and have largely rejected Murray's reading of it, a scholarly finding this page states plainly rather than repeating the claimed ancient lineage as settled fact. Doreen Valiente, who worked closely with Gardner from the early 1950s, wrote much of the Craft's liturgy still used today, including its characteristic duotheism, a Horned God and a Triple Goddess read as the tradition's two central divine figures.

The planetary day and hour correspondence system this report item works from is a separate and genuinely much older tradition that Wicca adopted rather than originated: it is documented in Renaissance astrological magic texts, notably Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's 1533 De occulta philosophia, the same source this atlas's own Angels and Spirits page already cites for its archangel table. The "familiar", an animal spirit companion, is likewise a documented feature of early modern European witch trial testimony, recorded here as historical and folkloric material rather than presented as reliable evidence of anything supernatural.

How A Reading Is Constructed

A reading returns the materials, herbs, stones and colors, and the planetary days and hours a chart lines up with under the older correspondence tradition described above, naming what a person might work with and when rather than prescribing a ritual procedure, and names the gods of the Craft, the Horned God and the Triple Goddess Valiente's liturgy centers, a chart's placements are read as answering to.

Where To Read More

• SaturnPlanetsSaturn, whose day the tradition assigns Saturday.
• VenusPlanetsVenus, whose day the tradition assigns Friday.