This entry records that Wicca, a modern pagan religion formally developed in mid-twentieth-century England primarily through Gerald Gardner and subsequently diversified into numerous distinct traditions, structures much of its ritual invocation and prayer, addressed typically to a Goddess and a Horned God or to a wider range of deities depending on the specific tradition, around material recorded in a Book of Shadows, a personal or coven-specific ritual text traditionally copied by hand from a teacher to a student during initiation, without reproducing that liturgical content here.
Different Wiccan traditions, including Gardnerian, Alexandrian and many later independent and eclectic lineages, maintain distinct versions of core ritual material, some historically treated as oath-bound and appropriately shared only within a specific initiatory line, meaning there is no single authoritative Wiccan prayer book comparable to a scripture that could be excerpted, and material published commercially by various authors since the 1970s, while influential, does not carry the same status within many traditional lines as material transmitted through direct initiatory teaching.
Some published Wiccan authors, including Doreen Valiente, who worked directly with Gardner, are specifically credited within the tradition for composing widely used liturgical material, such as the Charge of the Goddess, giving at least some Wiccan invocatory text a documented individual authorship rather than the fully anonymous transmission more typical of older religious traditions.