Wicca Wicca (sometimes called Wicce, The Craft, or The Old Religion by its practitioners) is an ancient religion of love for life and nature. In prehistoric times, people respected the great forces of Nature and celebrated the cycles of the seasons and the moon. They saw divinity in the sun and moon, in the Earth Herself, and in all life. The creative energies of the universe were personified: feminine and masculine principles became Goddesses and Gods. These were not semi-abstract, superhuman figures set apart from Nature: they were embodied in earth and sky, women and men, and even plants and animals.This viewpoint is still central to present-day Wicca. To most Wiccans, everything in Natures -- and all Goddesses and Gods -- are true aspects of Deity. The aspects most often celebrated in the Craft, however, are thr Triple Goddess of the Moon (Who is Maiden, Mother, and Crone) and the Horned God of the wilds. These have many names in various cultures.Wicca had its organized beginnings in Paleolithic times, co- existed with other Pagan religions in Europe, and had a profound influence on early Christianity. But in the medieval period, tremendous persecution was directed against the Nature religions by the Roman Church. Over a span of 300 years, millions of men and women and many children were hanged, drowned or burned as accused Witches. The Church indicted them for black magic and Satan worship, though in fact these were never a part of the Old Religion. The Wiccan faith went underground, to be practiced in small, secret groups called covens. For the most part, it stayed hidden until very recent times. Now scholars such as Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner have shed some light on the origins of the Craft, and new attitudes of religious freedom have allowed covens in some areas to risk becoming more open. How do Wiccan folk practice their faith today? There is no central authority or doctrine, and individual covens vary a great deal. But most meet to celebrate on nights of the Full Moon, and at eight great festivals or Sabbats throughout the year.Though some practice alone or with only their families, many Wiccans are organized into covens of three to thirteen members. Some are led by a High Priestess or Priest, many by a Priestess/Priest team; others rotate or share leadership. Some covens are highly structured and hierarchical, while others may be informal and egalitarian. Often extensive training is required before initiation, and coven membership is considered an important committment.There are many branches or traditions of Wicca in the United States and elsewhere, such as the Gardnerian, Alexandrian, Welsh Traditional, Dianic, Faery, Seax-Wicca and others. All adhere to a code of ethics. None engage in the disreputable practices of some modern cults, such as isolating and brainwashing impressionable, lonely young people. Genuine Wiccans welcome sisters and brothers, but not disciples, followers or victims.Coven meetings include ritual, celebration and magick (the k is to distinguish it from stage illusions). Wiccan magick is not at all like the instant special effects of cartoon shows or fantasy novels, nor medieval demonology; it operates in harmony with natural laws and is usually less spectacular -- though effective. Various techniques are used to heal people and animals, seek guidance, or improve members' lives in specific ways. Positive goals are sought: cursing and evil spells are repugnant to practitioners of the Old Religion. Wiccans tend to be strong supporters of environmental protection, equal rights, global peace and religious freedom, and sometimes magick is used toward such goals. Wiccan beliefs do not include such Judeao-Christian concepts as original sin, vicarious atonement, divine judgement or bodily resurrection. Craft folk believe in a beneficent universe, the laws of karma and reincarnation, and divinity inherent in every human being and all of Nature. Yet laughter and pleasure are part of their spiritual tradition, and they enjoy singing, dancing, feasting, and love. Wiccans tend to be individualists, and have no central holy book, prophet, or church authority. They draw inspiration and insight from science, and personal experience. Each practitioner keeps a personal book or journal in which s/he records magickal recipes, dreams, invocations, songs, poetry and so on. To most of the Craft, every religion has its own valuable perspective on the nature of Deity and humanity's relationship to it: there is no One True Faith. Rather, religious diversity is necessary in a world of diverse societies and individuals. Because of this belief, Wiccan groups do not actively recruit or proseletize: there is an assumption that people who can benefit from the Wiccan way will find their way home; when the time is right.Despite the lack of evangelist zeal, many covens are quite willing to talk with interested people, and even make efforts to inform their communities about the beliefs and practices of Wicca. A History of Witches Most people now days think of witches as green, wart-covered , frightened and scared peasants and clergy, and falsely accused by children striking back at their strict elders. Before the worship of male dominated religions and monotheistic religions, there was one called The Old Religion. When Christianity was thought up, many attempts were made to convert to the "new" religion. The popes at the time built their churches on the site of the old temples to discourage the old worship and encourage the new. They called the old worshipers "pagans" and "heathens" which was somewhat accurate since pagan means people who live in the country and heathen means one who dwells on the heath. The European Trials were one big spread of mass hysteria. This was fueled by guides to "witch-hunting" mainly called maleficariums. The most famous one was the Malleus Maleficarum written in 1486 by two German monks named Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger. There were many others, but none were more widely published. These books were full of religious propaganda and the beliefs of the authors. With the panic increasing, people accused anyone they suspected of "non-religious" behavior and those who used supposed magic to heal. They really used herbs and other forms of healing. Over the years in Germany, England, France, Spain, and countries around them, so-called "witches" were burned. Over three centuries nine million people were burned, hung, or otherwise killed, tortured and humiliated. The Church set up a group of special people to deal with the accusations. These people were called Inquisitors. When people were accused, the magistrates of the cities put them in jail and got the Inquisitors to question them. The so-called "questioners" then proceeded to take the person into their room and tortured them to get a confession, since they couldn't kill them without a confession. They tortured them by stripping them naked and either putting pins under their nails, ripping their nails out, putting them on a stretch rack or an iron maiden, pouring scalding hot water on them, putting them on a wheel partially in water and spinning the wheel, using hot rods to burn it out of them and many more disgusting and painful procedures. They burned so many people that in one German village they burned over 600 people at once, and in another village there were almost no women, children or cats left because they were all killed. They burnt cats because they were thought of being familiars of the Devil and the witches. This helped bring on the Black Plague because there were no cats to kill the rats who carried the plague. In 1736, an Act was passed that stated since there was no such thing as witchcraft, the people who claimed to have occult powers were to be charged with fraud. This largely killed the witch accusations and the actual members of the Old Religion went into hiding. The Salem Trials are perhaps the most well known in America. They started on January 20, 1692; with two girls, nine-year-old Elizabeth Parris and eleven-year-old Abigail Williams. They were thrown into convulsive seizures, mysterious fits and trance-like states. Later, more girls began to exhibit similar behavior. They started the accusations by accusing three women. Tituba, a slave of Elisabeth's uncle, who was a minister; Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. Warrants were immediately issued to bring these women in for questioning. Tituba readily confessed that she was a witch, saying that she had seen the Devil in the shape of a hog and sometimes as a dog. Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good both maintained that they were innocent. After Osborne, Good, and Tituba were examined; the townspeople began to accuse more people. Most of the accused were women whose behavior was bad or if they were poor. In March and April, Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, Elisabeth Procter, Sarah Cloyce, John Procter, Mary Warren, Bridget Bishop, Abigail Hobbs, Nehemiah Abbott, and many more were accused of being witches. They were all examined and of all of them only Abigail Hobbs confessed and only Nehemiah Abbott was cleared. The main examiners were John Hathorne (whose grandson Nathaniel added a w to the last name, making it Hawthorne), Captain Samuel Sewall, Jonathan Corwin, deputy Governor Thomas Danforth, with occasional help from Increase Mather, and his son, Cotton Mather, both of which were ministers and highly intelligent. The first to die was Sarah Osborne, who died in a Boston prison. The first official death by hanging was Bridget Bishop on June 10, 1692, not as some people think, Sarah Good. Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Wildes, and Sarah Good were all executed on July 19. When they were on the gallows, the Reverend Nicholas Noyes called Sarah Good to speak and confess, when she replied, "I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink." This was thoroughly chilling to hear, since this was not what was expected out of a dying Christian, but it was expected out of a witch (or a malevolent old woman). The most important victim out of this trial was not Sarah Good, but Rebecca Nurse. No one wanted to believe that she, a good Christian woman, was a witch. Hathorne's own sister and her husband even testified that she was not a witch, and Hathorne had doubts while examining her. They even found her not-guilty of witchcraft during the preliminary hearings, but when this verdict was announced, all of the young girls who were being afflicted by witchcraft made a hideous outcry, as if being hurt, to the sheer amazement of the court. When she was brought before the grand jury, Amber Putnam, Sr., putting on more theatrics, said that the apparition of Nurse, came to her and started to choke her. After this testimony almost everyone in the room decided that the decision of the lower court was the wrong one. They used a slip of the tongue against Nurse in the final trial. When a fellow prisoner was brought to testify against Nurse, she said, "What, do you bring her? She is one of us,". The person prosecuting Nurse claimed that this was acknowledgment of her membership in a coven of witches. She really meant that the woman was a fellow prisoner and that she was not legally allowed to testify. But the harm was done. The jury reconsidered the previous verdict and this time convicted Rebecca Nurse of witchcraft. On July 19, she was executed along with Sarah Good and the other women, and she was the very model of good Christian behavior. On November 25, 1692, the General Court of the colony of Massachusetts, created the Superior Court to handle the remaining cases of witchcraft. This time no one was convicted. In all, twenty people died in Salem. Thus ended the Salem Witch Hunts. Since the first witch hunts so long ago, to the last of the Colonial Trials, over ten million people have died or been tortured because of fear of the unknown, hysteria, or wild accusations of children. Let this be a lesson to people who hate or fear what they think is different or strange. Fear is a disease which can kill millions of people, some even innocent, to keep safe a very few. Never+Again+The+Burning+Times This page is dedicated to those who lost their lives because they were accused of witchcraft. Most of these people were healers,medicine men/women,or people who were just different. This page is dedicated to those who were killed or who died in prison. It mattered not what religion they were. Those who died could have been pagan,most christian, maybe some jew, and others. Now is the time to put aside our differences and honor the dead. The sheer number of deaths in the Inquisitions is astounding. There was an estimated 200,000 to 9,000,000 deaths that took place. We must chant the words "Never Again".!! As Neo-paganism and Witchcraft grows, paranoia grows. We must be vigilante in our prevention of the stereotypes that plague our people. It could happen again. Most killed in the burning times were not witches, but rather accused of being so. They were killed by the people of the times because of fear of our people They must be honored.It must never happen again. Since the beginning of time war has been waged, war that has receded to hate crimes. In the past war was waged in courtrooms, town squares, and peoples homes. The war of good versus evil, not in the biblical sense or in the sense that most would think it, but in the sense of good and evil in the human soul and heart. This evil is much less defined then any evil that first comes to mind at the mention of the word. This war surfaced many times throughout history, but not so horribly as the Witch Craft Trials. These trials contrary to belief did not start and end in the 1600's but rather began with time and has never ended.The 1600's and the 1700's were when it was most prevalent, however, that does not mean that the slaying of innocent families in the recent past (1996) should go unheeded or without tears shed.It does not mean that the deaths of three women in the 1950's in Mexico should go unnoticed, 2 of these women were hung and one was burned at the stake.In the 1930's a woman was stoned to death for being a witch in France. Stoned,is the method of throwing rocks at a person until they lay dead of internal bleeding or of massive head injuries.The death of those innocents has been estimated at 7-12 million.Very few of these deaths were actually recorded, in the past witches were viewed as demons not humans therefore for the most part historians have had to use personal diaries and other documents of that nature to estimate the number of deaths. The most common methods of execution or' murder 'were burning, hanging, stoning, pressing and drowning. Burning was most common.The condemned witch was dragged to her death sight behind a horse ,bound at her hands.Most often her condition was so weak she was actually half dead. Once she reached the sight,crowded with onlookers,she would be bound hands, feet and head to a large pole protruding from the earth, commonly known as a stake. Firewood and kindling would be placed around her and the onlookers would spit and say cruel things to her. The drywood and kindling would be set aflame, and the crowd would watch her burn to death as she screamed for mercy, if she wasn't gagged. Occasionally a sympathetic executioner would break her neck before the dry wood was set aflame, but that rarely happened as doing such a merciful thing could condemn you to the same fate. Most hoped for a less painful death like hanging, but that was only because they didn't know what it was like. Hanging was just as horrible as burning but in different ways. When you were hung most often you did not suffer a broken neck and die almost immediately. You were suspended from your neck and suffocated to death in 2-3 minutes while suffering excruciating pain, feeling all your nerve ends slowly die. Drowning was a common death for witches as well, however this was not an execution but a test. You were tied at hands and feet and weighted with rocks (sometimes) and thrown into water.You were fished out minutes later and if you were alive you were innocent and god had saved you. Another variation of drowning was binding the witches hands and legs to a long wooden plank The plank is lowered so your head is under water and you are left. If you struggle you are a witch.If you sit still and trust in god and your innocence and live ,you were innocent. Stoning was another popular execution. Pressing was a means of torturing names or information out of a witch Pressing, a supposed witch would be bound either to a large flat rock or several boards and then boards would be placed atop them. Onto the boards extremely large, heavy stones were placed The more you refused to cooperate, the more weight. This continued until you either did as they asked or you died.These are not the only methods of execution, torture, and testing that were carried out,but the most commonly used . The religion of Witchcraft dates back about 25,000 years, to the Paleolithic Age, where the God of Hunting and the Goddess of Fertility first appeared. Out of respect for the power of Nature came a belief in beings, gods... who controlled the winds, the seas, the earth and the fires. Soon, the old ways of the common people came into conflict with a new religion that started with rulers and upper classes - Christianity. When the Christians decided that their new ways weren't catching on fast enough, things got a lot rougher for those who were practicing the Old Religion. Christian leaders began asserting that Witches were devil worshippers and savages. In the year 1233, Pope Gregory IX instituted the Roman Catholic tribunal known as the Inquisition, in an attempt to suppress heresy. In 1320, the church,at the request of Pope John XXII, officially declared Witchcraft and the Old Religion of the Pagans as a heretical movement and a hostile threat to Christianity. Witches had now become heretics and the persecution against all Pagans spread like wildfire throughout Europe. 'It is interesting to note that before a person can be considered a heretic, he or she must first be a Christian, and Pagans have never been Christians. They have always been Pagans.' Pope Innocent VIII in 1484, after he declared Witchcraft to be a heresy, instructed the Dominican monks Heinrich Kraemer and Jacob Sprenger to publish a manual for Witch-hunters. Two years later the work appeared with the title Malleus malificarum, or 'The Witches' Hammer.' The manual was used for the next 250 years in the church's attempt to destroy the Old Religion of Western Europe. Witches, along with countless numbers of innocent men, women, and children who were not Witches were persecuted, brutally tortured, often sexually molested or raped, and then executed by sadistic, bloodthirsty church authorities who taught that their God was a god of love and compassion. Once denounced, a suspected Witch was arrested and then hideously tortured into a confession. Suspects were subjected to thumbscrews, the rack, boots which broke the bones of the legs;deprived of sleep, starved and beaten. At times, hundreds of suspected Witches were killed in a day. Witchcraft in England was made an illegal offense in the year 1541, and in 1604 a law decreeing capital punishment for Witches and Pagans was adopted. Forty years later, the thirteen colonies in American also made death the penalty for the crime of Witchcraft. By the late seventeenth century, the followers who remained loyal to the Old Religion were in hiding and Witchcraft had turned into a secret underground religion after an estimated one million persons had been put to death in Europe and more than thirty condemned at Salem, Massachusetts, in the name of Christianity. When the persecutions ended in the 18th century, the stereotype of Witches as devil worshippers remained for those who were uninformed of the true nature of the Craft. Wiccan Creation Long, long ago, the world slept in the arms of the dark void. From this place of nothingness, Spirit drew together and created Our Lady of Infinite Love. The Lady danced among the heavens, Her feet beating out the rhythm of all creation. Sparks of light catapulted from Her hair, giving birth to the stars and planets. As She twirled, these heavenly bodies began to move with Her in the divine symphony of the universe. When Her dancing quickened She formed the seas and mountains of Earth. She chanted words of love and joy, and as these sounds fell to the Earth, the trees and flowers were born. From the pure, white light of Her breath came the colors of the universe, turning all things to vibrant beauty. from the bubbling laughter in Her throat sprang the sounds of the pristine running water of the streams, the gentle lapping vibrations of the lake, and the roaring screams of the oceans. Her tears of joy became the rains of our survival. When Her dancing slowed and She sought a companion to share the wonders of the world, Spirit created The Lord as Her life mate and companion. Because She so loved the Earth, Spirit made Her companion half spirit, half animal, so that together the Lord and Lady could populate our planet. The Lord's power moves through her and She showers the Earth and all upon it with Her blessings. Together, the Lord and Lady gave birth to the birds, animals, fishes, and people of our world. To protect and guide the humans, the Lord and Lady created the angels and power spirits. These energies walk with us always, though we may not often see them. Their speech creates a tapestry of positive energy, from which we draw strength. To each bird the Lady gave a magic song, and to each animal the Lord bestowed the instinct to survive. The Lord is the master of the animal and plant kingdoms, and therefore wears the antlers of a stag crowning His great head. This aspect of half man, half animal shows His joy in both the human and animal creations of the Spirit. As the humans began to grow and prosper, the Lord and Lady saw a need for healers among them. And so they drew forth energy from the realm of angels, the realm of the power animals, and the realm of the humans to create the Witches. The Witches brought with them the wisdom of the Lord and Lady, the ability to heal, and the art of magic. The Lady taught the Witches how to cast a magic circle and talk to Spirit, and the Lord taught the Witches how to communicate with the energies of air, fire, earth, and water, and commune with the animal and plant kingdoms. At first, the humans accepted the Witches and treated them fairly; but because the Witches are different, humans began to fear the Wise Ones of the Lord and Lady, thus the Witches became the Hidden Children, conducting their rites of positive energy in secret lest they risk capture and death at the hands of uneducated humans. As the world grew darker with ignorance and hate of human creation, The Lady took the body of the Moon to represent the gentle light of her perfect peace, and the Lord took the vibrant rays of the Sun as his symbol of strength in perfect love. And once a month, when the Moon is full, the Witches celebrate and remember the blessings our Mother has bestowed upon us. We call forth Her energy to help us take care of ourselves, our families, our planet, and our friends. Four times a year the Witches celebrate the festivals of fire and honor the Lord and His love for us - these are called the cross-quarters. At the four quarters of the seasons, the Witches honor the cycle of life and the gifts of the Earth with festivals to both the Lord and Lady - signifying the balance they have brought us - the Equinoxes and the Solstices. The Lady has many names - Isis, Astarte, Bride, Diana, Aradia, Hecate - and the Lady walks within and beside each woman of every race. The Lord has many faces, from the strong Cernunnos to the delightful Pan. He guards and guides us and resides in each man of every race. When thunder roars in the heavens, and lightning cracks from the ground, the Lord and Lady dance the divine myth of creation so that we may remember them and know that we are never alone. When the Sun rises each morning, we bask in the joy of His love for us, and when the Moon moves through Her phases, we understand the cycle of birth, growth, death, and rebirth. When it is our time, the Witches enter the Summerland. From the Spirit that moves and flows through the Lord and Lady we continue to learn the mysticism of the Universe so that we may return, life after life, to serve our brothers and sisters. In each lifetime, Spirit guides us through learning experiences, preparing us along the way for our individual missions. Sometimes we are born among our own kind, and in other instances we must seek out our spiritual family. Many of us do not remember our chosen path until we reach adulthood, but others know instinctively of their heritage from the time they form their own thoughts. We are the Witches, the representation of the growth of wisdom on our planet. We are the Hidden Children, back from the dead. We are the people, the power, the change, and we have incarnated in every race and every culture. We are the angels of Earth. - from LLewellyn's 1999 Magickal Almanac