Why wicca is fake

I even went along to a service once, and spent the whole time awkwardly mouthing the words to songs I didn't know and waiting to sit back down. But with Wicca, everything clicked. I immediately connected to it, from the strong emphasis on nature and the presence of both a god and a goddess to the Rule of Three the belief that anything you send out into the universe comes back to you, threefold.

I studied lists of exotic-sounding herbs and diagrams for creating a sacred circle, where spells are cast. I learned which colors and stones corresponded to luck, protection, and love. The part I adored most was preparing and performing rituals. Using every candle in the house, I arranged my own altar in the corner of my bedroom. I cast my own simple spells, reciting incantations and burning scraps of paper, or burying trinkets in my backyard.

This solemn space was entirely my own, but it was also where I found a connection to something greater: the revelation that I, an average teenage girl, had within myself the power to shape the world around me. I didn't tell anyone about my newly found practice, except my best friend who immediately started helping me write and perform spells. She says current fraud laws are strong enough to target people who take advantage of others, and that witches shouldn't be singled out. There's a big difference between providing a service - like a tarot reading - and preying on people's beliefs or fears of magic to manipulate them out of large sums of money, she said.

She charges for tarot readings, and believes genuine fortune tellers never tell clients they're cursed or that they can cure an illness. Instead, she says she offers general life advice, and clients have the choice whether to take her advice or not. She says you shouldn't have to prove that magic is real in order to practise it, or earn a living from it. Witches cast spell on Brett Kavanaugh. Face of 'witch' reconstructed.

Witches cast 'mass spell' against Trump. Life as a Wiccan YouTuber. Image source, Getty Images. An illustration of the trial of George Jacobs, who was hanged during the Salem witch trials in More than people were accused during the trials, and 20 were executed, making it the deadliest witch hunt in North America.

In , Gavin and Yvonne Frost started the School and Church of Wicca — thus, also claiming to be the founders — and helped to spread the religion to America. In one chapter another Great Rite is described. Initiates are given a sponsor of the opposite sex, usually the newest member of the coven, though this can be altered if there are major weight differences between the sponsor and initiate so as not to crush a small girl under a large man, for example.

Prior to the rite, boys must be circumcised if not already and instructed in sexual technique by their sponsor. Girls must have their hymen broken, either by their mothers or, as the Frosts later suggested, surgically. They are then given two wooden phalluses to practice with in order to prepare themselves for the experience of sex.

Three days before the rite the candidates fast, eating only bread and honey. When the rite begins the candidates are given alcoholic mead then participate in naked dancing and finally intercourse with their sponsor.

Likewise, most witches condemn such behaviour and practices but the fact remains that there are veins that run through witchcraft which, if exploited, can cause serious harm. Miriam, a proud witch and feminist, is now married with three children uses her experience to help others, writing a blog on Wicca and working as Miss U, an advice columnist for the website Loving at A Distance.

After her experience, she is acutely aware of dangers of the imbalance of power. Wicca helped me heal and move on. Although Gardner claimed to have learned Wiccan lore from a centuries-old coven of witches who also belonged to the Fellowship of Crotona, Davis wrote that no one had been able to locate the coven and that Gardner had invented the rites he trumpeted, borrowing from rituals created early in the twentieth century by the notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley , among others.

Wiccans today, by their own admission, have freely adapted and embellished Gardner's rites. Hutton had conducted detailed research into the known pagan practices of prehistory, had read Gardner's unpublished manuscripts, and had interviewed many of Gardner's surviving contemporaries. Gardner seems to have drawn on the work of two people: Charles Godfrey Leland , a nineteenth-century amateur American folklorist who professed to have found a surviving cult of the goddess Diana in Tuscany, and Margaret Alice Murray , a British Egyptologist who herself drew on Leland's ideas and, beginning in the s, created a detailed framework of ritual and belief.

From his own experience Gardner included such Masonic staples as blindfolding, initiation, secrecy, and "degrees" of priesthood. He incorporated various Tarot-like paraphernalia, including wands, chalices, and the five-pointed star, which, enclosed in a circle, is the Wiccan equivalent of the cross.

Gardner also wove in some personal idiosyncrasies. One was a fondness for linguistic archaisms: "thee," "thy," "'tis," "Ye Bok of ye Art Magical. Some Gardnerian innovations have sexual and even bondage-and-discipline overtones.

Ritual sex, which Gardner called "The Great Rite," and which was also largely unknown in antiquity, was part of the liturgy for Beltane and other feasts although most participants simulated the act with a dagger—another of Gardner's penchants—and a chalice.

Other rituals called for the binding and scourging of initiates and for administering "the fivefold kiss" to the feet, knees, "womb" according to one Wiccan I spoke with, a relatively modest spot above the pubic bone , breasts, and lips. Hutton effectively demolished the notion, held by Wiccans and others, that fundamentally pagan ancient customs existed beneath medieval Christian practices. His research reveals that outside of a handful of traditions, such as decorating with greenery at Yuletide and celebrating May Day with flowers, no pagan practices—much less the veneration of pagan gods—have survived from antiquity.

Hutton found that nearly all the rural seasonal pastimes that folklorists once viewed as "timeless" fertility rituals, including the Maypole dance, actually date from the Middle Ages or even the eighteenth century. There is now widespread consensus among historians that Catholicism thoroughly permeated the mental world of medieval Europe, introducing a robust popular culture of saints' shrines, devotions, and even charms and spells.

The idea that medieval revels were pagan in origin is a legacy of the Protestant Reformation. Hutton has also pointed out a lack of evidence that either the ancient Celts or any other pagan culture celebrated all the "eight feasts of the Wheel" that are central to Wiccan liturgy. Historians have overturned another basic Wiccan assumption: that the group has a history of persecution exceeding even that of the Jews. The figure Starhawk cited—nine million executed over four centuries—derives from a late-eighteenth-century German historian; it was picked up and disseminated a hundred years later by a British feminist named Matilda Gage and quickly became Wiccan gospel Gardner himself coined the phrase "the Burning Times".

Most scholars today believe that the actual number of executions is in the neighborhood of 40, The most thorough recent study of historical witchcraft is Witches and Neighbors , by Robin Briggs, a historian at Oxford University. Briggs pored over the documents of European witch trials and concluded that most of them took place during a relatively short period, to , and were largely confined to parts of present-day France, Switzerland, and Germany that were already racked by the religious and political turmoil of the Reformation.

The accused witches, far from including a large number of independent-minded women, were mostly poor and unpopular. Their accusers were typically ordinary citizens often other women , not clerical or secular authorities.

In fact, the authorities generally disliked trying witchcraft cases and acquitted more than half of all defendants. Briggs also discovered that none of the accused witches who were found guilty and put to death had been charged specifically with practicing a pagan religion.