Publication, Law and the Making of a Religion

The timing was not accidental. Britain's Witchcraft Act was repealed in 1951, and until then a public claim to practise witchcraft carried legal risk. The book appeared three years later, at the first moment such a claim could be made openly, and its publication was a deliberate act of foundation rather than a disclosure that happened to be permitted. Its effect was rapid. Readers wrote in, groups formed, and a practice that had existed among a small number of people became a movement with new members who had come to it through print. That change of scale altered the tradition itself: an initiatory religion transmitted person to person now had a public text as its entry point, and the tension between those two modes of transmission has run through modern paganism ever since.

Historians of the subject read the survival claim as unsupported and the religion as new, assembled in the twentieth century from identifiable materials. That judgment concerns the historical claim and not the religion's standing, and Wicca's own scholars and practitioners have largely absorbed it. The atlas records the book as the founding public document of a modern religion, which is a stronger description than the one it makes for itself.