Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A Neopagan nature religion based in part on pre-Christian Celtic beliefs and practices, typically centering on a mother goddess or a goddess-god pair and the practice of ceremonial witchcraft.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • proper noun A religion derived from pre-Christian times, also called Witchcraft{4}, which practices a benevolent reverence for nature, and recognizes two deities, variously viewed as Mother & Father, Goddess & God, Female & Male, etc.; its practitioners are called Wiccans, Wiccas, or witches. Since there is no central authority to propagate dogma, the beliefs and practices of Wiccans vary significantly.
  • proper noun A practitioner of Wicca, also commonly called a Wiccan, Wicca, or witch .

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • proper noun A neopagan religion first popularised in 1954 by British civil servant Gerald Gardner, involving the worship of God and Goddess and the observance of eight Sabbats.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the polytheistic nature religion of modern witchcraft whose central deity is a mother goddess; claims origins in pre-Christian pagan religions of western Europe
  • noun a community of followers of the Wicca religion

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Old English wicca, necromancer; see witch.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

A twentieth-century representation of the Old English wiċċa. The modern use of the term was introduced first as Wica on page 102 in Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today (1954), alleging that the term was used as a self-designation by practitioners of witchcraft who initiated him in 1939. The spelling Wicca is first attested on page 95 in Gerald Gardner's Meaning of Witchcraft (1959).

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