Witchcraft Today

Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today, published by Rider and Company in 1954, three years after Britain's Witchcraft Act was repealed, is the founding public document of modern Wicca, presenting Gardner's claim to have been initiated into a surviving pre-Christian witch cult. Its strength as a historical source is exactly that it is the primary text that launched a new religious movement, the correct thing to cite for what Gardner himself asserted and when. Its limit, and this is the point on which the book must be handled carefully, is that the historical claim it makes, an unbroken surviving witch cult reaching back to pre-Christian Europe, is rejected by historians of religion and of the witch trials, who find no credible evidence for such continuity; the book is cited here as the document that made the claim, not as evidence that the claim is true.