Wicca vs. Witchcraft vs. Paganism
Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of neopagan material that treats Wicca, witchcraft, and paganism as though they’re interchangeable. This is likely to be the material that newbies see first. Paganism and witchcraft are actually completely separate things, and Wicca is a point at which they intersect. Here are the differences, and why they matter:
Paganism is a catch-all term for pre-Christian polytheistic religions, mostly in Europe, although Middle Eastern, Egyptian, and occasionally Mesoamerican polytheistic religions get lumped in. Whether Hinduism counts or not depends on who you ask. (Technically, paganism is any religion that isn’t one of the three Abrahamic ones, but that definition is so broad that it’s barely useful.) Most people who identify as “pagan” today are neopagans — people who practice modern reconstructions of ancient polytheistic religions, or people who practice religions that are based on or adjacent to Wicca. There’s lots of different flavors of neopagan, but most will acknowledge the gods of those old polytheistic religions in some capacity. Depending on how broad you want the definition of “pagan” to be, there are thousands, possibly millions of pagan gods. Under the original definition, all gods but one are pagan.
Witchcraft is currently the most popular term for folk magic, although it remains a very loaded term. Almost every culture has some kind of magical practice baked into it, and these practices follow general conventions that have been in place for thousands of years. Because folk magic is universal, one does not need to be pagan to practice it — in fact, most of the Western tradition of folk magic is thoroughly Christian, because most of the West has been Christian for the last two millennia. Most practitioners of folk magic also do not identify as “witches,” because until very recently, “witch” was a pejorative. A witch was, specifically, a person who worked malevolent magic — folk practitioners called themselves by other names, like “cunning men” or “wise women” or something of that nature. Nowadays, the term “witchcraft” is associated primarily with European and American folk magic. But even then, people can’t agree on what it means. I was asking about this on r/witchcraft the other day, and I got mixed responses. One person essentially said that witchcraft was like folk magic, but with more spiritual aims instead of purely mundane ones, but that distinction is thoroughly modern. Another person said that “witches” were professionals with deep spiritual knowledge as opposed to lay practitioners of folk magic, but that’s another distinction that didn’t exist historically. I continue to associate it with folk magic.
The main reason why witchcraft and paganism are associated at all is a book published in 1921, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Margaret Murray. In this book, she argued that people who were accused of being “witches” — people who had allegedly sold their souls to the Devil in exchange for malevolent magical powers — were actually people who practiced an underground pagan religion that had somehow survived conversion, and worshipped a horned deity that got demonized. Murray selectively interpreted evidence to arrive at this conclusion, and took trial records at face value. Her work was dismissed by scholars, but it took a long time for the general public to catch on.
Wicca is a specific religion founded in the mid-twentieth century by Gerald Gardner and his associates. Wicca originally claimed to be this secret underground pagan religion described by Murray, and its practitioners call themselves witches. Because Wiccans originally assumed that all of the historical “witches” must have been pagans, they drew no distinction between paganism and witchcraft — to be one was to be the other. But this claim is false, and I don’t think any Wiccans make it anymore. Wicca is actually an amalgam of many different things, mostly contemporary occultism and nineteenth-century ideas of what paganism might have been like. Its practitioners worship two deities, a Goddess associated with the moon, and a God with horns. Many Wiccans interpret all the many thousands of gods from polytheistic religions the world over as “aspects” of these two, and can theoretically worship any deities from anywhere in the world. So, Wiccans simultaneously have thousands of gods and only two. Wicca, or the public form of it anyway, is extremely popular and has dominated the conversation on both neopaganism and occultism since the 70’s. So, a lot of modern neopagans use the Wiccan model when it comes to approaching and understanding their deities, and will assume that they must practice witchcraft to be neopagans and vice-versa.
Therefore, you’ll find a lot of people on Witchtok or elsewhere on the internet who worship all different kinds of pagan gods in the context of witchcraft. Hecate is one of the most popular goddesses, being a goddess who is explicitly associated with witchcraft, and Pan among the most popular gods, because of the “horned god” connection. Other popular gods from the Greek pantheon include Dionysus, Aphrodite, Artemis, Hades, Persephone, Apollo, and Hermes. Celtic gods are also pretty popular because of Wicca’s interest in Celticism and pseudo-Celticism. Cernunnos is one of the most popular, again as the “horned god” (which is an impressive comeback for him, because we know almost nothing about the historical version of him, and he was very nearly lost to time). You’ll often see Cerridwen and the Morrigan, sometimes Brigid, Blodeuwedd, Arianrhod, Lugh, and Rhiannon. Among Norse gods, Loki seems to be the most popular, though you’ll also see Freya, Odin, and Thor. Among Egyptian gods, Bastet, Anubis, and Isis. The popularity of gods among modern witch-pagans does seem to correlate to their presence in pop culture. Many witch-pagans also identify as “eclectic” and practice a syncretic form of neopaganism. Eclectic paganism often (but not always) uses Wiccan ritual as a base, and pulls from different pagan religions, with a syncretic pantheon.
This is all to say that there’s no one answer to the question. The answer will depend on whether the person is pagan, a witch, or both, what kind of pagan they are, and whether they use Wicca’s duotheistic model or not. Paganism and witchcraft are both such broad categories that they can’t be conflated.
