The Norse and Saxon Gods

Seax-Wica affirms devotion to Norse and Saxon deities, in particular Woden and Freya, in place of the more generic God and Goddess of other Wiccan traditions. Founded in 1973 by Raymond Buckland, Seax-Wica clothes a Wiccan framework in the imagery and names of the Anglo-Saxon and Norse pantheon, honouring Woden as the god and Freya as the goddess and drawing on Germanic myth and symbol for its ritual and seasonal observance. Raymond Buckland, who had brought Gardnerian Wicca to the United States after his own initiation by Gerald Gardner's associates in 1962 to 1963, created Seax-Wica in 1973 partly as a deliberate break from Gardnerian secrecy: he published the tradition's complete rituals openly in his 1974 book The Tree: The Complete Book of Saxon Witchcraft, allowing anyone to self-initiate and practise without ever meeting an existing coven, a step that directly contradicted the oath-bound, lineage-transmitted secrecy that Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca required. Buckland later said he created the tradition in part to demonstrate that a coherent, workable Wiccan system did not require the claimed unbroken historical lineage Gardner had asserted for his own tradition.