This week we are talking Wicca! Why Wicca? Because no matter how you slice it, Wicca is the single most influential modern Pagan religion. Many early Heathen practices were very influenced by Wicca. Join us as we talk about why Wicca was so influential, and how this religion came into being.  We will be discussing Charles Leland, who put Aradia or the Gospel of the Witches on the map, and Margaret Murray, who introduced Europe to her very dicey Witch Cult of Wester Europe hypothesis.

Mathiesen, Robert (1998). “Charles G. Leland and the Witches of Italy: The Origin of Aradia”.  In Mario Pazzaglini (ed.). Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, A New Translation. Blaine, Washington: Phoenix Publishing, Inc. p. 25.

Russell, Jeffrey (1982). A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics and Pagans. Thames and Hudson

Hutton, Ronald (2000). Triumph of the Moon. Oxford University Press

Sheppard, Kathleen L. (2013). The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in Archaeology. New York: Lexington Books.

Simpson, Jacqueline (1994). “Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her and Why?”. Folklore. 105.

Valiente, Doreen (1989). The Rebirth of Witchcraft. London: Robert Hale.

Noble, Catherine (2005). “From Fact to Fallacy: The Evolution of Margaret Alice Murray’s Witch-Cult Theory”. The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies. 7

Wood, Juliette (2001). “Margaret Murray and the Rise of Wicca”. The Pomegranate: A New Journal of Neopagan Thought (15)

Purkiss, Diane (1996). The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations. Abingdon: Routledge.

Murray, Margaret A. (1962) [1921]. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

 ———  (1952) [1931]. The God of the Witches. London: Faber and Faber.