Wiccan

Wicca is duotheist at its centre and expansive at its edges, and both halves of that are deliberate.

At the centre are the Goddess and the God, understood as complementary rather than opposed. The Goddess is associated with the moon and with a threefold form; the God with the sun, the forest and the hunt. Their relationship, and specifically its seasonal course, is the tradition's principal narrative.

That course is a cycle rather than a history. The God is born, comes to maturity, joins with the Goddess, dies and is born again, and the eight festivals of the Wheel of the Year mark the stages. Divine power here is not inherited or seized but annually renewed, and there is no succession between generations because the same figures return.

At the edges, the tradition is openly inclusive. Deities of many pantheons may be invoked, and the widely quoted formulation that all goddesses are one Goddess treats named deities as aspects of the central pair. That is an emanational position and it is why the atlas records the structure as such.

The traffic between human and divine runs downward and is ritual rather than mythological. In drawing down the moon the Goddess is invoked into the priestess, who speaks. A human being is not promoted into the pantheon; the divine is brought into a person for the duration.

Wicca is one of the few traditions in this atlas whose emergence is documented in living memory, in print, and in the papers of the people involved, and that visibility has been uncomfortable for some of its claims about itself.

The tradition became public through Gerald Gardner, who published Witchcraft Today in 1954, shortly after the repeal of the British legislation under which such claims could have been prosecuted, and The Meaning of Witchcraft in 1959. He presented what he described as a surviving pre-Christian religion into which he had been initiated.

Subsequent research has examined that account closely. Historians have traced identifiable components to sources available to Gardner: the ritual magic of earlier societies, ceremonial and literary material, folklore scholarship of the period, and an academic thesis about a witch cult surviving from antiquity that was influential when he wrote and is no longer accepted. What the evidence supports is a religion assembled in the mid twentieth century from older materials rather than transmitted intact from before Christianity.

Most practitioners today are comfortable with that, and the tradition's own historians have done much of the work establishing it.

The Book of Shadows, the working text, is copied by initiates and varies between lines. Versions have been published, which the initiatory lines regard differently, and the tradition has diversified far beyond its original form.