MODERN WICCA

From Gerald Gardner to the Present

(Llewellyn USA 2009)

 

Drawing on the author’s nearly fifty years of involvement with modern neo-pagan witchcraft or Wicca, this book offers an intimate portrait of the life of its founder, Gerald Brosseau Gardner (1886-1964) and its history and development in the 20th century. It reveals little known facts and stories relating to the unusual men and women who shaped Wicca over the past sixty years. They include Aleister Crowley, Alex Sanders and influential Gardnerian initiates like Doreen Valiente. From the Museum of Witchcraft on the Isle of Man to the origins of the ‘Book of Shadows', Modern Wicca traces the expansion of Wicca as it spread from its homeland in the United Kingdom to the United States and beyond. It also takes the reader behind-the-scenes to reveal the once closely guarded secrets of the modern Craft of the Wise.