Wicca and Witchcraft have a severe credibility crisis

Witchcraft sometimes called Wicca is a form of paganism based around sabbats, magic spells and the God and Goddess.  It claims to be the old religion that was persecuted in the witch craze of the Dark Ages.
  
WICCA OR WITCHCRAFT

Some scholars and practitioners of Wicca and Witchcraft make a distinction between Wicca and Witchcraft. If they are right you can be a Witch without being a Wiccan or vice versa. They see Wicca as an offshoot of Witchcraft or an outright invention that appeared in the middle of the twentieth century.  For traditional Christianity, Witches were women who consorted with the Devil and obtained favours from him.
 
Charles Godfrey Leland was the first to argue that the Christian claim that Witchcraft was Devil-worship was not true. He gave the world, Aradia, the Gospel of the Witches, which was allegedly partly written by an Italian witch called Maddelena. It was first published in 1899. This small book declares that Diana is the supreme goodness and rules the universe with Satan who is her equal. Witchcraft is declared to be a pagan religion. If religion is the right word to describe a system that blessed the gods if they did what you wanted and cursed them and wished them ill if they did not.

Margaret Murray claimed that Witchcraft was paganism, the Old Religion that had nothing to do with Satanism. She just guessed this for all the records claim that the witches did worship the Devil. She accepted parts of the records that described rites and ceremonies and ignored the rest which spoke of orgies with the Devil and his magical powers except to turn the Devil, when she could, into a man in black who led the ceremony so he was not the Devil after all.

Gerard Gardner revived Witchcraft in the middle of the twentieth century when he founded it with the aid of his Book of Shadows, a grimoire for witches, but there is no evidence that he was telling the truth. Certainly, some of his rites were from Aleister Crowley and Aradia and some of the material was invented. But it is best and most rational to assume that Gardner told the truth when he said that Witchcraft had survived and was not Satanism. The witches believed in secrecy for the jealousy and hatred of others would affect their magic and dilute it. The rites could have been so simple that anything left behind where they celebrated would not lead to suspicion.

It is likely that the Witch rites of casting magic circles and using pentacles and complicated paraphernalia were borrowed from the ceremonies of Ritual Magic. There is no proof that Witchcraft was founded by Gerard Gardner. He might have been in contact with Witches. It was natural that there would not have been much proof that the rudiments of Gardnerian Witchcraft were always cherished and practiced on the earth. We know that Gardner did invent and plagiarise some of the rites but that doesn’t mean he made it all up.

The religion as revealed by Gardner has rites that should focus on philosophical and ethical development but which focuses on nature myths and stories instead. The Charge of the Goddess was evolved from a passage in Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches and Aradia has significant doctrinal and practical differences from Wicca. For example, the male God is evil and Diana is a mixture of good and evil unlike the Wiccan God and Goddess. The Wiccan God and Goddess are seen as love by some Wiccans or as being beyond good and evil by others. Wicca denies the existence of the Devil.
 
Aradia never mentions the eight festivals celebrated in Wicca. The magic circle isn’t mentioned in it at all while in Wicca it is an essential that the magic circle be set up. Representing the four elements of fire, water, earth and air is essential in Wicca but Aradia has not even thought of it. The Witches Law, An it harm none do what ye will, is denied in Aradia which allows the use of poisonous magical potions to get rid of rich people who oppress the Witches. There is no evidence that Gardner did not invent Wicca. Aradia would suggest he did invent it. Such a secretive religion would be unable to stick to a rigid doctrinal and ethical format.
 
Gardner called Witchcraft Wicca. This word is said to mean to bend. Witches bend the laws of nature with their magic. Some believe that it means wicked or willow worshipper. The word witch is rejected by many Wiccans but it seems to have been derived like the word wit from an old word meaning wise. Witch is usually taken to mean wise one. A man can be a witch for the word is unisex.  The pagans practiced magic and worshipped the gods. It seems silly to set up a new pagan religion or to revive paganism in a so-called new form and call it Wicca or Witchcraft.

Witches follow the Wiccan Rede, their law of magic, “An it harm none do what ye will”. Witches are not allowed to do harm with their magic.

Laurie Cabot, official Witch of Salem, says that all spells must be cast in the spirit of intending it to be for the spell-casters good and for the good of all people. Read her book, Power of the Witch.

All things are caused by a universal domino effect. For example, if I had went a minute earlier to get my exam results last year all subsequent events would have been different and so John would not have died in a horrific car smash when and why and where he died. When the spell cannot cause the good of all it is either nonsense or it is evil. The evil forces may give you what you want but at a huge price to other people. The notion of white and black magic is a mistake. All magic is trying to get something at the expense of other people. The Witches Law says that if you do any bad magic it will come back on you three times stronger. This idea seems to have arisen in the seventies and probably was inspired by attempts to make it seem that witches would be too scared to get up to no-good or by the superstition that luck, bad and good luck, comes in threes. If you do a spell to make a person sick the magic will return to you and make you three times worse. If that were true there were would be no happy witches but they would all be getting electric shock treatment for acute depression for in magic you have to do and cause some evil to do good. For example, if you cast a spell to make Amy more loveable to Jake and she meets Dean and Dean dies in a stabbing the magic could have killed Dean to stop him getting in the way of Jake seeing Amy as nice and perhaps somebody he would like to love. You will have to die three times for you are still responsible no matter what your intention was.

Witches say that desiring the effect and visualising it are essentials in doing magic effectively. Cabot and most witches say you have to be very careful how you word a spell for what you ask for you will get. This denies that desire causes the spell to work and takes us back to the superstition that just thinking about something and saying some words is enough to make a spell work. We know by thousands of years experience that this is wrong. If spells work by pictures in your head and by desire then the desire for what you want will determine what you get not mistakes in the words for words are only as good as what you mean by them.
 
The witches also say that if you are healing a person you must project for the end result not the means in case you are not projecting the best way to help the person. This contradicts the rule that you must cast a spell “for my good and the good of all” as they direct. If this command was effective and made sure the magic did only good why would it matter if you project the means or not? They use their rule so they should not worry about causing the wrong way to help somebody. The real reason for the rule is to cover up the ineffectiveness of magic.  John and Tanya are trying to have a baby. John wants Tanya to have their baby and casts a spell for it to happen. If he projects that the baby will be born by IVF and she has one naturally then clearly the spell has failed. But if John projects simply so that she will have a baby he will think his spell worked. By leaving the means out it makes it look more like the spell worked. It was perhaps 50/50.  Witches then must refuse to project how the result will take place to make it more likely that it looks that their spells work. If they project for the means that is harder than just projecting for the end and far more daring. The end is one thing but there are millions of means that happen in millions of ways – so they want to cover up that magic is a failure.
 
You could project that John will get cured of his pneumonia in Dallas Memorial Hospital. And what might happen is that he will stay at home to recuperate or go to a clinic or another hospital.  There are many possibilities. Perhaps he might not even have pneumonia!
 
If you project simply that he gets better of his pneumonia then what if he gets better of his sickness without magick? Surely then the spell will have to make him contract the illness again so that he can be cured as in the projection you made?
 
Somebody has a deep wound. You visualise it healed. You see intact skin in your visualisation. Now to cause the perfect skin, the spell might cause an infection in the wound that is so bad that the skin has to be taken off and replaced with grafts. No wonder it looks so perfect in your visualisation. And if you visualise a scar you are causing a scar. The Church seems to be right that all works of magic, if there is a Devil, are his work.
 
Some witches visualise a scene they don't want to happen. Then they might imagine a white x appearing across it as they call on magic to prevent the event happening. But they see the scene and so are causing it to happen and then the x to cancel it is seen. The magic then will surely cause the unwanted event but get it over with quickly like it has been cancelled or something. The x is violent in the sense that it fights an event that is feared. It is fighting evil with evil. No evil should be necessary in magic.
 
If you imagine your house on fire and then an x appearing across it you may be both projecting a fire and not projecting it. The spell then will do nothing for you at all except make it a fifty fifty chance that your house will go on fire or will not. What else can it do for it can't make both? You are increasing the chances of fire! If you let it alone, the chance of fire breaking out would be a lot lot less.
 
Witches don’t believe in the good of all rule which will block their spells from working for they are afraid of spells that are not of pure motivation. They either do their spells with a bad hypocritical motive or they are only pretending to themselves and everybody else that they cast them.
 
If it is true that you might not project the best means to the end then it follows that if you project the end you might be zapping for something that is not best for the person. Maybe they need to suffer and die to learn a lesson before they come back in another life? Many would say the witches are definitely being hypocritical.
 
The religion of the witches is a nature religion. God and nature are regarded as the same thing. However, their God is two beings, the Goddess and the God. The Goddess has three aspects, Maiden, Mother and Crone and her manifestation is the form of woman and in the form of the moon. The God is the Horned Nature God, the prince of Day and Night, who is every man and who is the Sun. He is the Prince of Evil in the sense that he is evil that is necessary for good. So, he is not the Devil. The nature of the God and Goddess is love. This is all wrong for evil has no meaning or use for us. We don’t need it when we have unfree will. It simply should not be. And when magic is evil how could it be the energy of the Goddess and the God? Magic insults them if they are love so Witchcraft and Religion, the worship of superior beings are incompatible. The Goddess is the mother of the God and he dies in winter and is reincarnated when his mother gets pregnant by him. This is not incest but nature symbolism.

If the Witches were really wise they would abandon their religion. Their spells are so ineffectual that they cannot even lead them into the simple truth that is Humanism.

If the God and Goddess are really good then why don’t they make bad spells ineffectual instead of letting people perform them to get the bad energy back three times. They go further than the biblical law of tit for tat. Isn’t it coming back once enough? Witches say the gods honour our free agency so they let us have the power to do harmful magic. Then why don’t most people have these powers? Why don’t all spells work? Why it is if a woman casts a spell to make Ricky Martin fall for her that if the spell can’t work why can’t it give her virtual reality dreams in which she makes a heaven with him? It is the nearest she can get to fulfilling her will. Some respect for free will this! Also, you do the rite but you have no evidence that the magic will succeed so what difference does it make to your free will if bad magic works or not for you still made a choice and things did not work out?

Witches have such reverence for nature though nature is evil and cruel. That makes people suspicious about how good they really are.

Also, the coven is important in Witchcraft though there are many solitaries. But resentment and jealousy will happen meaning that much of the magic will be spoiled. The true witch would be a lone one and would not wear her or his religion on her or his sleeve.

All Witchcraft is evil magic because when I am surer I will exist if my body is preserved it follows that I should put using magic to live forever in this body here and now first. Anything else is immoral magic. I should do spells to increase my power of matter so that I can expel the forces of aging from my flesh. If magic is really able to bless it should make me see this. So, magic is evil. Magic works by visualisation and willpower. If I only choose what I think is good then when I do evil it is because of a delusion. The true will wills only good so I can’t do evil magic. I can’t do any magic be it bad or good.

The Law that any bad magic you do comes back to you three times seems to have been invented in the seventies. The Witches often claim that the God and Goddess are love which is odd if they make a law that the magic returns three times stronger to harm you. One time would be enough. To cast a harmful spell is not as bad as stabbing anybody to death for the spell can be counteracted so it seems all evil must return three times. That is a depressing doctrine and implies there should be more suffering than there is.
 
Let us think about prayer. To work, prayer has to require some power from God to see into the hearts and minds of others. If you pray to be holy you are praying above all for guidance for if there is no guidance there can be no holiness. So you need guidance to see who is trying to corrupt you, who is opposed to God and your holiness. You have to be shown the secrets of the hearts of others to some extent. So prayer is a sneaky attempt to invade the privacy of others. It is an attempt to violate their secret place. Astrology and fortune telling are evil attempts to find forbidden information about others and prayer is no better. The fact that the vast majority of people are not that holy and have no right to the information because of that shows how evil prayer is. It's sneaky. Spells are probably more ethical than prayers!