by Matthew A. C. Newsome ©2002

I do have a life outside of Catholic Apologetics.  Professionally, I am the curator of the Scottish Tartans Museum in Franklin, NC.  This museum is dedicated to the history of Highland Dress (tartan, the kilt and all of that).  I also like to participate in medieval historic re-enactment.  One of the things that I have noticed in both of these areas (the Scottish-American community and the medieval re-enactment community) is the disproportionately large number of Neo-Pagans, Wiccans, and followers of other New Age spiritual paths that are attracted to these groups.
    I had a young man from the local college campus once call me at the museum to invite me to talk to his group, ISIS (a New Age spirituality club), about Scottish religion.  I told him fine, if he wanted me to talk about Catholicism and Presbyterianism (the official Church of Scotland).  He quickly lost interest.  What he wanted was a talk on Druidism and Pagan practices.  I have numerous visitors to the museum that also are looking for information on the "Old Celtic Religion" as they call it.  When I start talking about St. Columba, St. Ninian and St. Patrick, they are disappointed.
    The same holds true at the re-enactment events that I attend.  There seems to be a large number of the Neo-Pagan crowd that hold to the belief that Wicca existed as a kind of "underground church" during the Middle Ages that had to be suppressed by witch burnings and the like.  That these ancient pre-Christian beliefs continued to be practiced in secret throughout the medieval era and only came back above ground in recent times.
    Without making any judgment on the value of the spiritual practices and tenants of Wicca and other New Age faiths, actual historical records indicate that the above assumptions are simply not true.  Wicca has no ties whatsoever to any ancient or medieval religion, and is in fact of a very recent origin.
    I'd like to preface this article with a disclaimer.  There are those who believe that every Wiccan out there is a baby-eating Satan worshiper.  I'm not one of those people.  There are those who believe that every Wiccan is a vegetarian pot-smoking environmental radical.  I'm not one of those, either.  Nor do I think that New Agers are trying to covertly corrupt our youth through Harry Potter novels and Dungeons & Dragons.  In other words, I don't suffer from the same paranoia that many New Age types associate with fundamentalist Christianity.  I have some very good friends who are Wiccans.  I do not agree with their choice of religion (nor do they mine, for that matter), but they are actually very normal people.  I try not to prejudge a person.  And I would ask the same favor of those of you reading this article who might at first see me as a close-minded Christian bigot who is unfairly attacking your faith.  I am not.
    I am simply hoping to illustrate that what many people who practice the Wiccan religion believe to be true about the history of their faith is simply not the case.  At the end of the day, if this does not bother you, then so be it.  But let's look at the facts.
    The modern day Wiccan movement sounds very much like an ancient Celtic religion.  It celebrates the feasts of Beltain and Samhain, Imbolc and Lughnasadh, which are indeed ancient (insular) Celtic festivals.  Much of the vocabulary used in the Wiccan faith comes from the Celtic past.  But how much of a connection is there, really?
    In my study of the Celtic peoples I have found that very little of the assumptions that we have about them are true.  For instance, there never was a unified "Celtic culture" that dominated the British Isles and Western Europe.  The many tribes of the pre-Roman era were diverse and varied in their governmental structure, language, custom, and religion (much like the diverse multitude of Native American tribes that span the American continents).  We classify them together because of similarities in their language and culture that we call "Celtic."  But they themselves would have had no concept of being a unified people.
    We know next to nothing about the religion these people practiced.  What little bit of actual written information that has been preserved for us comes from sources such as Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul, where he describes very briefly druid priests making human sacrifices.  But as a conquering Roman, his perspective is surely skewed and his account is extremely brief.
    Some old pagan customs seem to have survived in places such as Ireland and Scotland, where monks in the Celtic Church shaved their tonsors in the manner of the druid priests (the front of the head, rather than the top).  And we know what sites the old druids held to be holy because early churches tended to be built upon these locations as the population was Christianized.
    A few scant remnants of pagan practice and custom survive in a Christianized form here or there in Europe.  But nothing of a formal religious system survived.  And from what we could tell these pagan peoples had more in common with modern day animists in Africa, who believe in spirits dwelling in all natural things, than the Wiccans of today.  They were true pantheists who saw innumerable different gods, rather than the one goddess that Wiccans worship.  Every village seemed to have it's own gods and goddesses.
    But perhaps the most telling of all is the rapid manner in which most of these people (starting with the rulers, and moving down to the common man) quickly abandoned their pagan ways for Christ upon the arrival of the missionaries. St. Columba is credited with the Christian conversion of the Picts of Scotland, and he came in the sixth century (though other missionaries, such as St. Ninian, had begun to convert other parts of Scotland prior to this date).  By the time the pagan Vikings began their raids in Scotland, not three hundred years later, it was already an entirely and thoroughly Christian land.
    There simply does not seem to be enough known about the pre-Christian Celtic religions to make any kind of claim that Wicca is the same faith.  In fact, what little we do know about the Celtic beliefs point to their being no unified religion at all, but many different local beliefs.
    Even though it is a common attitude that Wicca is an old Celtic faith, and many of their celebrations have a very Celtic flavor, is that what Wicca really claims of itself?  As it turns out, no.  It claims a much, much more ancient origin.
    As a disclaimer, let me say that, unlike most mainstream religions, there is no "Holy Book" for Wicca.  There is no "Wiccan Pope."  This lack of authority for the faith makes it very hard to say what Wicca does and does not teach, and what individual Wiccans believe is wide and varied.  However, what most people point to as the standard reference work for the Wiccan faith is The Spiral Dance:  A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, written by Starhawk (Miriam Simos) and published in 1978.
    Starhawk, from California, claims that Wicca is the oldest Western religion, and that it actually pre-dates the Indo-European culture.  She claims it has origins dating back to the last Ice Age.  Practitioners worshipped a single "Mother Goddess" and a horned male god, who died and was resurrected each year.  She describes their culture as very in tune with nature, very respectful of women, and very egalitarian.  No violence, war, or killing at all until the Indo-Europeans came in and introduced a patriarchal, male dominated society that included weapons of violence and the worship of war-gods, among other things.  Wicca survived, however, and was next challenged by the coming of Christianity.  It survived this as well, by remaining underground, or by living on in the form of Christian practices.
    In the fourteenth century, she claims that the Church began a Holocaust of sorts aimed at finally wiping out the Wiccan faith.  She calls the next 400 years the "Burning Times" and claims 9 million Wiccans were burned by the Church.  But the "Old Faith" survived even this.  It just went even deeper underground until it finally emerged again in the 20th century.
    This fascinating story has not only been repeated in various other New Ages books, but it has also influenced the writings of many radical feminists who have no connection at all to the Goddess movement.  It would be even more fascinating if any of it were actually true.
    As it turns out, the evidence for any of this narrative actually occurring is scant at best.  And the evidence for Wicca being an invention dating back no earlier than the 1950's, based on bad archaeology and the late nineteenth century occult movement, is overwhelming.

    In the 1950's a man named Gerald Gardner, an amateur anthropologist, introduced a religion that he called "Wica" (this seems to be the first use of the term).  Gardner was an admirer of the German and French Romantics (mostly men), who had a fascination for natural forces (including those linked to women).   He belonged to a group called the Fellowship of Crotona, which was influenced heavily by late nineteenth century occultism and Freemasonry.
    Gardner claimed that in 1930 he stumbled upon a coven of witches in an English forest (who also belonged to the Fellowship of Crotona).  These witches taught him all of the tenants of their faith, Wica, which Gardner then adopted as his own.  Modern day Wiccans freely admit that the practices and rituals of their faith come from Gardner.  Yet this supposed coven of witches has never been found, and the rituals that he describes seem to have been taken from a variety of contemporary sources, such as Freemasonry (which Garner was involved in), the British occultist Aleister Crowly, and Charles Lelland, an American folklorist who claimed to have found a surviving cult of the goddess Diana in Tuscany.
    Gardner also drew heavily on the writings of British Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who in the 1920s claimed that she had discovered archaeological evidence for the worship of a single mother goddess figure in ancient times, and that the "witchcraft" persecutions of the Church were actually attempts to destroy a popular religion that was in competition with the Christianity.  More recent archaeological evidence and further study has completely disproven Murray's theories, however.
    Two books of note have been published recently that help shed light on this issue.  One, in 1998, entitled The Goddess Unmasked:  The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality, is by Philip G. Davis, professor of religion at the University of Prince Edward Island.  He concludes that the modern Wiccan movement has origins no deeper in the past than Gardner's "Wica" creation.
    Another, published in 1999, is The Triumph of the Moon by Ronald Hutton, a renowned historian of pagan British religion at the University of Bristol.  Hutton knows as much as any man on the actual practices of the pre-Christian pagans in Europe.  He has read Gardner's unpublished manuscripts and even interviewed surviving contemporaries of his.  He has found absolutely no evidence at all that Gardner's "Wica" has any relation to any actual pre-Christian faith, or that his supposed "coven of witches" ever existed.  No pre-Christian religion can be shown to have celebrated all "Eight feasts of the Wheel" that Wiccans observe.  Indeed, he can find no pagan festivals associated with the equinoxes at all, and shows them to be a nineteenth century innovation.
    Hutton also shows that the idea of old pagan practices living on beneath the surface of Christian rites has no founding in reality.  His research shows that outside of a handful of practices, such as decorating with greenery at Yuletide, virtually no pagan practices survived, let alone hidden worship of pagan gods and goddesses.  Instead, he found that Catholicism permeated the life of the Middle Ages, and the idea of pagan religions influencing Christianity is simply a legacy of the Protestant Reformation, when the Catholic Church was first accused of being a pagan cult by those that rebelled against her.
    So what about the history according to Starhawk?  What are we to make of it?
    Let's look first of all of this figure of 9 million witches burned by the Church.  This has been picked up by countless modern feminists and historical revisionists.  Modern Wiccans hail these 9 million as martyrs of the faith.  In the year 2000, on the Jubilee Day of Pardon, pagan leaders demanded a special apology from Pope John Paul II for this "pagan Holocaust" that never happened.  But how accurate is that number?  Not very.  It seems to have been first suggested in 1893 by American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and others seized upon this number without ever doubting it.  Gage was using the works of a late eighteenth century German historian as her source, but most modern historians put the number of people burned in witch trials at around 40,000.  Still a large number, still a tragedy, but a far cry short of 9 million.
    According to Robin Briggs, author of Witches and Neighbors (1996), most of these witch trials occurred in a few isolated areas of Europe, and those tried were generally accused not by clerical or secular authorities, but by their neighbors, usually other women.  In fact, the church seems to have disliked having to try these cases, acquitting over half of them.  (And for those who think the Catholic Church is to carry the blame of these trials, according to an article by Sandra Miesel in Crisis magazine, Oct. 2001, Catholics and Protestants alike were among those involved in the witch trials, and Catholics and Protestants alike also spoke out against them).
   Most telling of all is the fact that no "witch" was ever accused of worshiping any pagan deity, let alone a Goddess/Earth Mother resembling the goddess of the Wiccan faith.  The witch trials of the seventeenth century were aimed at devil worship, or diabolical possession.  The accused were normally social outcasts, feuding neighbors, and social and economic rivals.  And the Inquisitions of the Middle Ages were aimed at something else entirely -- Christian heresy -- not paganism or devil worship.  Seemingly, there was no paganism alive to combat.
    And what of the assertion that there existed some pre-historic worship of a single mother goddess, from which Wicca is derived?  Much of the scholarship to that effect springs from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century.  It was only in the late nineteenth century that anthropologists began to speculate that there may have been some ancient belief in a single mother goddess, and that there existed a pre-historic matriarchal society.  They believed that Stone Age people had no concept of the man's role in reproduction, and so worshipped women for their life-producing powers.  This was soon picked up on by archaeologists, who then began to see every female figure they found at ancient sites as evidence for this mother goddess worship.
    An example is Sir Arthur Evans, who, when he excavated the Minoan palace at Crete, found frescoes of bare breasted women carrying snakes, and concluded from this that the Minoans worshipped the mother goddess.  Other examples abound in archaeology from this period.
    But most of this "scholarship" has since been discredited by more modern anthropological and archaeological studies.  The idea, for instance, that Stone Age people had no idea about how women became pregnant is now rejected by the scientific community as a Victorian fallacy.  And as for the archaeological evidence?
    Well, perhaps the most important archaeological discovery for followers of the Wiccan faith is James Mellaart's excavation of a 9,000 year old settlement in Catalhoyuk (in southern Turkey).  This settlement apparently housed 10,000 people.  He found that there were no fortifications, that all of the dwellings appeared to be the same size, and he also found a large number of female figurines.  From this, he determined that these people lived in a peaceful, egalitarian society, and that they worshiped the mother goddess -- just as the anthropologists would have predicted.
    However, in 1993, another archaeologist, Ian Hodder, re-excavated the site using more modern techniques.  And what he found is quite interesting.  He used isotopic analysis of the skeletons found there to determine their diets.  And he found that the men and women were treated quite differently at the dinner table.  Men ate most of the meat and had a rich protein diet that enabled better physical activity.  Women ate mostly plant food.  This can be interpreted in many different ways, but it does show that there was a class distinction being made and that this was not a completely egalitarian society after all.
    Hodder found figurines that depicted men as well as women, and many of an indeterminate sex.  And he found that animals were depicted in figurines more often that women.  And following the modern archaeological practice of using the location of objects as a tool to their interpretation, he points out that most of the female figurines were found in trash heaps.  What this tells us about their religion is open for debate, but it certainly would be off the mark to say from this evidence alone that this society worshiped a single goddess mother.
    And in excavations in Turkey contemporary to Catalhoyuk, archaeologists have found fortifications, weapons, and bones showing signs of cuts.  So it would seem that this society was not as peaceful as Mellaart initially suggested, either.
    One of the most popular books on goddess spirituality has been Living in the Lap of the Goddess, (1993) written by Cynthia Eller.  However, after learning of this more recent archaeology, she has written and had published (in 2001) a new book, entitled The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory.  In this new book, she firmly states that no serious archaeologist believes that ancient European cultures were matriarchal, or even women-focused, and that many of the artifacts previously interpreted as "goddesses" are really no such thing.
    Not all involved in the Wicca movement are willing to come to terms with this new historical account of their faith.  Some rigidly cling to the history according to Starhawk.  Many, including Starhawk herself, now refer to these as "Wiccan fundamentalists."  Most now view this history of Wicca as an "origin myth" and not factual history.  People rationalize it in different ways.  Some say that the "ancients" were worshipping the Wiccan goddess even if they did not recognize her the same way that modern Wicca does.  Others realize Wicca's 20th century origins while at that same time lauding it as a valid religious movement.
    Author Charlotte Allen attributes Wicca's popularity today to the need for ritual that it fills, without having any of the rigid moral tenants or demand for obedience that Christianity does.  My own experience has indicated to me that many are first attracted to Wicca precisely because of its reputation as the "Old Faith."  It is its supposed antiquity that people find attractive.  We all have the sense, at some level, that ancient people had traditions and wisdom that we have lost, and are the worse for it.  People turn to Wicca in search of this wisdom.
    But rather than being the faith of the ancients, Wicca is more a manifestation of our modern disdain for the true faith of our fathers (and mothers), the only universal faith that the West has ever known -- Christianity.