For many people the issue of a Christian being a Witch is moot, even if the Bible doesn't forbid it, because they believe that Witchcraft is a Neo-Pagan religion called Wicca. We have already thought about this a little bit in the "What is a Christian Witch" article, now we will think through this in more depth.

Wicca is often said to be the religion of Witchcraft. Quite a few will assert that Wicca and Witchcraft are just two different synonyms for the same thing. Often along side this one to one equation of Witchcraft with the religion of Wicca is a belief that this religion is basically the same religion as the Paleo-Paganism practiced by the pre-Christian Celtic peoples of Western Europe. According to the Murray Thesis the ancient faith was not supplanted by Christianity, but simply went underground and was passed down through Witch families. Thus the Witches of the Middle Ages and early Modernity may have been nominally Christian, but in truth were secret Pagans preserving the old ways.

In England during the middle third of the 20th Century, Wicca either was brought out from its underground existence into public view or "re-invented" from many sources including what was known of ancient Celtic Paganism. The originator of modern Wicca, Gerald Gardner, claimed that he was simply making public what had been a secret tradition. However, many Wiccans believe that Gardner was more creating a mythic truth in this claim than he was reporting literal facts.

At first the only Wiccans were Gardnerians, but soon divergence happened and there became many different Traditions of Wicca. Most of them, however, share a few things in common. They are centered on two manifestations of the Divine in the form of a Feminine Goddess and a Masculine God.

They identify the Goddess with the Earth and the Moon. Often the Goddess is called the triple Goddess of Maiden, Mother and Crone, of which the three aspects are related to the cycle of the Moon which can be divided into three segments, the waxing new Moon which is the Maiden, the full Moon which is the Mother and the waning old Moon which is the Crone. The Goddess is also identified with many Goddesses from many diverse Pagan myths.

The God is identified with the Sun, but more importantly is identified with the life cycle of vegetation and the life force found in animals. The God is understood to be both the child of the Goddess and her consort who impregnates her and thus his own Father. Then he dies to give life to the earth but is reborn each year. Often times this cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth is connected to the cycle of the year. The God is sometimes called the "horned one" in that he is thought to represent unbound fertility and he is crowned with the horns of a wild buck.

Wiccans often refer to their deities as "The Lady" and "The Lord". They believe that in this worship they are recovering an ancient way of relating to the Divine that existed before Christianity.

Most Traditions of Wicca are centered on the coven, a small group of Witches who meet for ritual purposes regularly, often on the Full Moon or at the eight sabbats of the year. Initiation rituals are an important part of the coven life and many Wiccans do not consider anyone a valid Witch unless they have been initiated into a coven, a process which sometimes takes a year and a day. However, many Wiccans are solitary and eclectic, meaning they practice their faith as an individual without a coven and they don't adhere to a set tradition.

At the heart of the coven experience is a particular religious experience called "Drawing Down the Moon." This is a ritual where a Priestess represents the Goddess and the Moon, that is the Goddess herself, is drawn down upon the Priestess and possesses her. Sometimes a similar thing happens with the God and a Priest.

Clearly, any reflection upon Wicca and Christianity will realize that they are two very different faith systems, even though they share many things in common. Many will think with its "Lady" and "Lord" and its yearly cycle of the "Lord" being born, dying and rising, and with its main focus on piety being connection to the "Lady" that Wicca is really a modern "paganization" of Medieval Catholicism where the "Lady" was Mary and the "Lord" was Jesus. However, many Wiccans will counter that it is the other way around, that Medieval Catholicism was a "christianization" of an earlier Paleo-Paganism. Probably there is truth in both assertions.

But a main difference between the two faiths is that Wicca rejects the idea of a Scripture or a universal revelation that is in any sense authoritative. But we have already seen that Wicca does have certain beliefs about the Divine. However, Wiccans will say that they don't believe this way because it was revealed in any Scripture, but solely because it reflects their own personal spiritual experience. Wicca is an intuitive faith instead of a revealed one.

Also Wicca rejects any idea of sin and a need to be redeemed from it. Wiccans also tend to embrace a belief in reincarnation and the idea of Karma. Unlike most Eastern faiths that share these beliefs, however, Wicca shares with Christianity and Judaism the belief that the material world is not an illusion. Wicca emphasizes that the material world is a good thing and believes that the sensual experience is sacred, an idea shared in some strains of Christianity and rejected in others.

Finally Wicca fully embraces the ritual in magick and spell. Often times becoming Wiccan and being initiated into a coven means learning and making one's own the spells and rituals of the coven. However, Wicca does also emphasize the personal nature of ritual and spell and encourages personal creativity.

If we reflect back on my contention in the "What is a Christian Witch" article that being a Witch means doing one's religion, whatever one's religion is, in a certain way that includes being a Nature Mystic, being a Spiritual Feminist, and embracing Psychic Ritualization, then I think it is pretty obvious why Wicca is known as the Religion of Witchcraft. What I mean is that Wicca with its feminine Goddess, with its Lord and Lady being identified with Nature, and with its focus on magick is in its entirety as a faith system one that completely embraces being a Witch. There is little wiggle room in Wicca for one to do that religion in any other way other than the threefold path of Witchcraft.

However, it seems to me that there are elements of Wicca that go beyond the embracing of Witchcraft. Wicca has its own mythology of the Goddess and God, even if this mythology is not a "required" one. It also has a metaphysic in reincarnation. Finally it has a central focus in the practice of "Drawing Down the Moon". It seems to me that these elements are not requirements of being a Witch at all.

This is why it is possible to be a Witch and not be Wiccan. It is true that most folk who call themselves Witches will most likely be Wiccan, after all Wicca is the Religion of Witchcraft and it would make sense that a great many folk who feel called to walk their religion as a Witch would feel drawn to the Religion of Witchcraft. But it is also very possible that some folk will not feel drawn to the elements of Wicca which I've mentioned above that go beyond the threefold path of Witchcraft: Nature Mysticism, Spiritual Feminism, and Psychic Ritualization. This may be due to the fact that they already have an existing religion that is vital for them and they don't feel any need to jettison it for a different faith. Or it may be due to the fact that the specific elements of Wicca don't resonate for them as the best way to explain their spirituality.

This is the reason why it is proper to accept that there are Witches whose faith system is other than Wicca. Some may find themselves to be Neo-Pagan, just a different kind of Neo-Pagan than Wiccan. Others may feel drawn to an Eastern faith like Taoism or Hinduism but walk that faith as a Nature Mystic, Spiritual Feminist and a practitioner of magick.

Finally of course, for our purposes, many will find themselves to be Christian, to find the central focus of their faith to be the person of Jesus of Nazareth. These Witches are not interested in being Wiccan because they feel no need to cease being Christian in order to be a Witch. Many of these Christian Witches may in fact go through a "Wiccan phase" as they first encounter the Craft only in a Wiccan dress and it takes them a while to realize they don't need to jettison their own religious path to embrace themselves as a Witch. (The opposite corollary to this is the reality that many Wiccans go through a "Christian phase" as that was the prevalent organized spirituality around them when they first began seeking their spiritual path and it took them awhile to realize there was an alternative more congruent for them.)

At this point I want to point out that my brief outline of Wicca is necessarily a simplification of a complex phenomenon. If anyone is interested in learning more about Wicca and other Neo-Pagan faiths, the best work I have found as an introduction to them is the book by Margot Adler called "Drawing Down the Moon".

It is important to remember that the term "Christian Witches" covers quite a lot of diverse folk. Among them you will find some whose practice of their Witchcraft is nothing at all like Wicca, you might also find some who seem to be completely Wiccan except for them the Lady is Mary and the Lord is Jesus. Some of these latter may even be initiates in Wiccan covens.

So there is more than one answer to this question!

So it may appear that some Christian Witches are mixing elements of Wicca with Christianity. However, it seems to me that behind this question is usually an unexpressed and hidden assumption, namely that it is wrong to be in one religion and be influenced by others. Christian Witches get this reaction from some folk from both Christian and Wiccan camps. The Christians seem to think that being influenced by other faiths is nothing but a pollution of the true faith. The Wiccans seem to think that Christianity and Wicca are so incompatible that the very idea of mixing them is an oxymoron.

However, this is all nonsense. All religions have been influenced by other faith systems. Christianity in its early days had no problem in borrowing Philosophical concepts and terminology from Greek Pagan thought. We also know that Judaism borrowed ideas from Zoroastrianism during the period of the Persian Empire. Scholars tell us that older Hebrew prayers and psalms bear a striking resemblance to Egyptian and Canaanite hymns. Islam borrowed directly from Christianity the idea of pilgrimages and a fasting period every year and directly from Judaism the uncleanness of pork. Hinduism absorbed ideas from Buddhism and Christianity even placing Jesus in its pantheon of incarnations of Vishnu. The Buddhism of East Asia is so heavily influenced by Taoism that it is almost a totally different faith than the Buddhism of South Asia that never went through this process.

Christian Witches as they seek to follow Jesus by walking the threefold path of Nature Mysticism, Spiritual Feminism and Psychic Ritualization often find that the Spirit works through enlightened folk of other faith systems. This is an old Christian idea and is the reason why classical Christianity has no problem relying on Plato, Aristotle, and Virgil as enlightened vessels through whom the Spirit worked. It only follows that when one goes looking for resources in Witchcraft that the majority of them will be written in a Wiccan framework, after all Wicca is the Religion of Witchcraft.

Individual Christian Witches will determine for themselves what they find in these Wiccan influences that are transferable over into their Christian practice of Witchcraft and what isn't. This really isn't much different than some Christian groups being heavily influenced by Judaism, even to the point of calling their churches synagogues, meeting on Saturdays, and following the Torah. Many Christians churches that don't go that far still have no problem singing Jewish folk songs in their Christian worship.

Some might say, "But Christianity came from Judaism and so that is different." But it is important to remember that Christianity also always had Pagan influences too. For instance the New Testament emphasis on Jesus Christ being "Lord", or "kyrios" in Greek, was clearly understood as a Christian parallel to the Pagan idea that Caesar was "kyrios". Biblical Scholars tell us that many of the primitive Church's language about Christ was derived from Pagan sources and transferred over to Jesus.

What is considered one of the two central holidays in the Christian life, Christmas, is clearly a parallel of the Pagan Winter Solstice feast where the birth of the sun was celebrated. The veneration of Mary and the Baby Jesus is so close to the ancient Egyptian devotion to Isis and Baby Horus that there is no way to deny the influence of the one on the other.

Furthermore, if one were to attempt to purge out of Christian practice all things which might be borrowed from other faith systems, one would be left with hardly anything. This would include praying, singing, dancing, meditating, congregating, memorizing one's Scripture, studying and preaching one's Scripture, a common meal of bread and wine, washing with water to symbolize or create spiritual washing, having holidays, communing with the Divine at certain times of the day, making weddings and funerals spiritual events, belief in an afterlife, belief in sin and redemption, belief in righteous living, belief in a moral code, having clergy, using flowers, candles and incense in worship, having choirs, meeting in buildings, having vestments in worship, asking individuals to make personal commitments of their own faith, making pilgrimages to holy places, and evangelizing. Such a purge would turn Christianity from a vital Religion that makes it possible to live out ones spiritual connection with God in Christ into nothing but a few disembodied doctrines about Jesus that did nothing but exist in the believer's mind.

So the issue in the Christian Witch's mind isn't if they are being influenced by others in other faith systems or even if they are mixing their Christianity with Wicca. The issue is solely rather the concepts and rituals they are incorporating into their religious life are compatible with their Christian faith. The source of these concepts and rituals are irrelevant.

When the question comes up whether influences from Wicca are or are not compatible with Christianity there are three areas that keep being raised by both Wiccans and other Christians. One is that Wicca is Polytheistic and Christianity is Monotheistic and that it would seem that Witchcraft requires a Polytheistic mindset. Another is the question of magick which we have partially addressed, basically the idea that the Christian path is reliance on God's power while the magick path is a seeking of one's own power and forbidden in the Bible. Finally there is the whole concern that Christianity teaches a belief in the Devil and evil spirits and that any kind of Witchcraft is occultic and demonic even if the practitioner doesn't think of it that way.

The next three essays will examine these concerns in greater depth.

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