The Repeal That Let Modern Witchcraft Speak

The Act was used against spiritualist mediums well into the twentieth century, and the best known case is that of Helen Duncan, convicted in 1944 for offences under it after wartime seances. That prosecution, and another the same year, are the last of their kind and they made the statute look absurd to a public that regarded spiritualism as a matter for belief rather than for the criminal courts. In 1951 the Act was repealed and replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which required proof of intent to deceive and of payment.

Ronald Hutton's history of modern pagan witchcraft treats the repeal as the practical precondition for what followed. Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today in 1954, presenting a surviving witch religion he claimed to have been initiated into, and the modern Wiccan movement grew from that publication and from the books and initiations that followed it. Hutton's own conclusion, argued at length from the sources, is that the religion Gardner described is a twentieth century construction assembled from folklore, ceremonial magic and Romantic scholarship rather than an unbroken survival, and the atlas records that as the scholarly position while noting that Wicca is a living religion whose practitioners hold various views of their own origins.