The Tree: The Complete Book of Saxon Witchcraft

Raymond Buckland's The Tree, The Complete Book of Saxon Witchcraft, published by Samuel Weiser in 1974, is the primary text itself, Buckland's own founding document for Seax-Wica, a tradition of modern Witchcraft he created and presented as an alternative to the Gardnerian lineage he had earlier helped introduce to America, explicitly designed to be self initiatory and open rather than requiring initiation through an existing coven. Its strength is that it is the actual founder's own statement of the tradition's practice and rationale, essential for any claim about what Seax-Wica specifically teaches, since Buckland created it himself and wrote this as its foundational text. Its limit is that Buckland presented Seax-Wica's Saxon framing as his own original synthesis rather than as a historically continuous Anglo-Saxon survival, a distinction the book itself is reasonably candid about, so a claim treating Seax-Wica as an unbroken ancient Saxon tradition rather than a twentieth century new religious creation modeled loosely on Saxon names and deities misreads the book's own stated origin.