Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft by Raymond Buckland

Although Murray's work underscored the research of Leland, she seemed to have been unaware of his groundbreaking studies. The church during the time of the burning, the Inquisition. Margaret Alice Murray (1863 –1963), an Egyptologist on staff at the University College in London, began researching the thesis that witchcraft was actually the remnant of an ancient pre-Christian fertility religion that had nothing to do with the Christian concept of a devil that the witches had allegedly worshipped and brought upon them the wrath of

However, a little over 20 years later, Dr. Although the book presented the Sabbats, rituals, spells, charms, and practices of witchcraft from the viewpoint of its ancient practitioners, the book went largely unnoticed by either scholars or the general public. Then, in 1897, Charles Godfrey Leland (1824 –1903), an American who moved to England in 1870 to study gypsy love, published Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches, which detailed the rites and beliefs of the old religion that centered upon Diana, the goddess of the moon, and her daughter, Aradia. Texts about witchcraft were published by Christian scholars, and portrayed the craft as devil worship or demonic possession. While there were no doubt hereditary witches who quietly practiced the old ways, there was little said publicly about witchcraft in Great Britain and Europe until the beginning of the twentieth century -perhaps because of the grim historical records of the Inquisition and its terrible trials for heresy and witchcraft that tormented the collective unconscious of the religiously minded.

In other words, rather than one great book of Wiccan beliefs, an ancient Book of Shadows dogmatically outlining creeds and ecclesiasticisms, there are many books by many men and women who carefully explain the belief structures, rites, and rituals of their particular expression of the craft. Athough there is the sometimes fiery debate as to the true historical roots of the faith, most Wiccans believe that none of them can dictate to any other just exactly what it is that they must believe. Those who follow the Wiccan path are a diverse group of individualists who pride themselves on being members of a religious philosophy that is flexible and adaptive to the needs of contemporary society.

Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft by Raymond Buckland