In April 1974, representatives of a range of American Wiccan and broader pagan traditions gathered in Minneapolis at a meeting sometimes referred to as the Witchmeet, convened partly in response to the movement's rapid growth and diversification across the United States and a felt need among some practitioners for a shared point of reference amid considerable variation in belief and practice between different traditions and individual covens. Out of this gathering, a newly formed body calling itself the Council of American Witches drafted a document known as the Principles of Wiccan Belief, a statement of thirteen points covering shared ethical commitments, a general orientation toward nature and the cycle of seasons, respect for both a god and goddess or for divinity understood in various ways, and an explicit rejection of the idea that Wicca is a form of Satanism, a distinction the drafters considered important given persistent public confusion on the point.
The document was deliberately framed as descriptive of common ground across a diverse movement rather than as a binding doctrinal statement any individual practitioner or coven was required to accept, reflecting Wicca's characteristic lack of centralized religious authority or enforced orthodoxy.
The Council of American Witches itself proved short lived as an organization, but the document it produced outlived it considerably, circulating widely in later decades among Wiccan and broader pagan communities in the United States and beyond.