#206 – Magic: Wicca and Witchcraft

🎙️ Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow are joined by Rebecca Fox — skeptic, comic-book creator, and co-host of The Seeker and the Skeptic podcast — who brings a uniquely dual perspective to the topic: she spent her teenage years and early twenties as a practicing Wiccan, and has spent the years since as a devoted science-and-skepticism advocate. The result is one of the more candid conversations MonsterTalk has had about a living religion — affectionate, clear-eyed, and occasionally very funny.

The episode also opens with a fond tribute to Terry Jones of Monty Python, who passed away on January 21, 2020 — the same day Blake recorded the intro, unaware of the news. The witch-weighing scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail plays out in full, which feels entirely appropriate.

🧹 What Is Wicca, Actually?

Wicca is a neo-pagan reconstructionist religion — and, as Rebecca notes, one of (at least) four extant British-born religions, alongside Thelema, modern Druidry, and chaos magic. She heard this taxonomy from occultist author Julian Vane, who helpfully illustrated each tradition via what kind of cake you might be offered at their respective gatherings. (Thelema’s offering comes with a significant caveat.)

Wicca was founded in the mid-twentieth century by Gerald Gardner, who claimed to have been initiated into a surviving ancient coven — a claim that later scholarship has found highly dubious. Gardner is considered the father of Wicca; modern Ross Nichols, founder of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, was a close friend and creative collaborator. Rebecca describes Gardner as a conservative man whose original vision was theistic and nature-linked, but not especially political — that would change once Wicca crossed the Atlantic.

📜 The Grandmother, the Father, and the Mother of Wicca

Margaret Murray is often called the grandmother of Wicca. An Egyptologist by training, Murray stepped well outside her field with The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), in which she argued that the victims of early modern witch trials were actually practitioners of a surviving pre-Christian fertility religion. Her footnotes go further still, speculating about a pre-human, small-statured, dark-skinned aboriginal people of Britain whose memory survives in fairy folklore. Murray’s hypothesis had an enormous influence on both the nascent Wiccan movement and on horror fiction — H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard both drew on her motifs, and Lovecraft cited her by name. The hypothesis has since been comprehensively discredited by historians.

Doreen Valiente is the mother of Wicca. She arrived in Gardner’s circle, noticed how much of his ritual material resembled Aleister Crowley‘s work, and offered to rewrite it. He said yes. Valiente’s literary contributions — most famously The Charge of the Goddess — gave Wicca much of its enduring poetic and ritual identity. Rebecca reads an excerpt on air.

🔮 Sympathetic Magic, Poppets, and Confirmation Bias

Rebecca gives a hands-on explainer of how a classic Wiccan spell works, using Blake as the hypothetical target. The mechanics come down to three principles: imitation (making something that resembles the subject), contagion (incorporating something that has been in contact with them), and symbolism (imaginative focus). Together these describe what anthropologists call sympathetic magic — the same operative logic attributed to prehistoric cave painters and to the use of poppets across cultures worldwide.

Rebecca is clear-eyed about why it feels like it works: confirmation bias. You remember the hits and forget the misses. The conversation also touches on Bruce Hood‘s research on contagion thinking — the psychological experiment in which people refuse to wear a serial killer’s jumper — as evidence that these intuitions run very deep in human cognition, probably for good evolutionary reasons.

🌿 Wicca Crosses the Atlantic

When Wicca arrived in the United States in the 1960s and 70s, it picked up passengers: environmentalism, feminism, and liberal politics. When it bounced back to the UK in the 90s, it came loaded with all three — which, Rebecca admits, was a perfect package for the teenager she then was.

The feminist strand produced Dianic Wicca, founded by Zsuzsanna Budapest (known as “Z”), whose first coven — the Susan B. Anthony Coven No. 1, formed in 1971 — focused exclusively on the goddess and admitted only women. Rebecca also discusses the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.), a feminist activist group that reclaimed the witch as a political archetype and declared: “You are a witch by saying aloud, I am a witch three times.” Very different from Gardner’s original vision.

The American encounter also introduced Jungian psychology into Wiccan theology — gods and goddesses reframed not as literal entities but as archetypes — which opened the door to a wide range of personal theologies coexisting within a single coven.

🏚️ Dorothy Clutterbuck and the Crumbling Sacred History

Gardner’s claimed link to an ancient witch lineage rested on one woman: Dorothy Clutterbuck, the wealthy, devoutly Christian woman he said had initiated him. Historian Ronald Hutton examined the evidence and found it wanting — Clutterbuck’s diaries survive, her tombstone at St. Mark’s in Highcliffe bears a passionately Christian inscription, and the dates suggest she was erecting a memorial to her late husband on the very day Gardner claims to have been initiated.

Rebecca was so determined to verify this for herself that she traveled to Highcliffe and took a rubbing of the tombstone. It confirmed Hutton’s account. She then presented the evidence to her former high priest — now a fellow skeptic and co-organizer of their local Skeptics in the Pub. He conceded. The discovery of the sacred history’s fragility was one of the primary reasons Rebecca left Wicca. Many other practitioners, she notes, simply reframe the origin story as deliberate mythology rather than literal history — and for them, that reframing is enough.

🌙 Wicca Today: Cells, Covens, and Instagram Witches

There is no central authority in contemporary Wicca. A handful of formal Wiccan churches exist in the United States, established largely for practical purposes like securing prison chaplaincies, but most practitioners ignore them entirely. Rebecca sketches three rough categories, adapted from a taxonomy Doreen Valiente once offered wryly: the solitary “cunning folk” quietly doing herbalism and tarot in the countryside; the community-minded Wiccans who put the religion on their census forms and attend organized covens; and the eclectic majority — younger, digitally connected, drawing from multiple traditions, and (Valiente’s original jab) reliably possessing the best jewelry.

The online witchcraft community includes a growing “SASS witch” contingent — Skeptic, Agnostic, Science-Seeking — who use ritual as a secular psychological tool rather than a metaphysical one. Rebecca finds this genuinely appealing, citing a Reddit user’s daily “coffee affirmation” spell as an example of ritual stripped to its psychologically functional core. She also floats the idea of reframing the Triple Goddess — maiden, mother, crone — as phases of the scientific method: exploration, hypothesis, testing.

📚 Further Reading

– 📚 The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present 💵 by Ronald Hutton
– 📚 The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft 💵 by Ronald Hutton
– 📖 The Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Margaret Murray
– 📚 A Witch’s Bible: The Complete Witch’s Handbook 💵 by Janet Farrar and Stewart Farrar
– 📚 Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power 💵 by Pam Grossman
– 🎬 The Craft 💵 (1996)

🔗 Related Links

– Gerald Gardner – Wikipedia
– Doreen Valiente – Wikipedia
– Margaret Murray – Wikipedia
– Ronald Hutton – Wikipedia
– Charge of the Goddess – Wikipedia
– Dorothy Clutterbuck – Wikipedia
– Wheel of the Year – Wikipedia
– Sympathetic Magic – Wikipedia
– Dianic Wicca – Wikipedia
– Zsuzsanna Budapest – Wikipedia

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

Download Episode MP3 (Right-Click, Save As)

We are joined by Rebecca Fox, who has been both a witch and a science & skepticism advocate, to discuss the history of modern witchcraft. 

RIP Terry Jones (of Monty Python) who passed away on Tuesday, Jan 21, 2020. I prepared the intro Tuesday morning unaware he would be gone the same day.

Discussed in this episode:

Gerald Gardner, father of Wicca 

Doreen Valiente 

Margaret Murray, an anthropologist whose The Witch-Cult in Western Europe was very influential on both Wicca and H. P. Lovecraft & R. E. Howard

Ronald Hutton, author of Triumph of the Moon and The Witch.