The Principles of Wiccan Belief

In April 1974, representatives of a range of American Wiccan and broader pagan traditions gathered in Minneapolis at a meeting sometimes referred to as the Witchmeet, convened partly in response to the movement's rapid growth and diversification across the United States and a felt need among some practitioners for a shared point of reference amid considerable variation in belief and practice between different traditions and individual covens. Out of this gathering, a newly formed body calling itself the Council of American Witches drafted a document known as the Principles of Wiccan Belief, a statement of thirteen points covering shared ethical commitments, a general orientation toward nature and the cycle of seasons, respect for both a god and goddess or for divinity understood in various ways, and an explicit rejection of the idea that Wicca is a form of Satanism, a distinction the drafters considered important given persistent public confusion on the point.

The document was deliberately framed as descriptive of common ground across a diverse movement rather than as a binding doctrinal statement any individual practitioner or coven was required to accept, reflecting Wicca's characteristic lack of centralized religious authority or enforced orthodoxy.

The Council of American Witches itself proved short lived as an organization, but the document it produced outlived it considerably, circulating widely in later decades among Wiccan and broader pagan communities in the United States and beyond.

The Principles of Wiccan Belief occupy an unusual position for a document sometimes loosely described as a Wiccan creed: Wicca has no central religious authority comparable to a church hierarchy capable of issuing binding doctrine, and the Principles were never intended, even by their own drafters, to function that way. Individual traditions, from Gardnerian and Alexandrian lineages to eclectic and solitary practice, have continued to hold varying beliefs on points the document addresses, and many Wiccans and pagans practice without ever having formally adopted or even encountered the specific 1974 text.

Despite this limited formal authority, the document has proven useful and durable precisely because it offered, for the first time in an accessible and widely reproduced form, a reasonably representative summary of positions common across much of the movement, useful to newcomers seeking orientation, to practitioners explaining their religion to outsiders, and to legal and academic contexts requiring some working definition of Wiccan belief, such as prison chaplaincy accommodation or religious recognition proceedings.

The Principles are best understood, in the assessment of most scholars of contemporary paganism, as an early and influential attempt at self-definition by a still young and rapidly diversifying religious movement, valuable as a historical snapshot of where a meaningful cross section of 1970s American Wiccan practitioners found common ground, rather than as scripture in any binding sense.