The NY Times has an article this morning (16 May 2007) about Wiccans: "Wiccans Keep the Faith with a Religion Under Wraps", the gist of the article being that Americans are becoming more and more tolerant of this rapidly growing religious movement. I've had little direct contact with Wiccans. I recall a local Wiccan priestess in Chicago who offered to bless my vegetable garden in the parsonage yard several years ago (I thanked her as graciously as possible, but declined). But I have been asked about Wicca by students doing research for papers. The last one informed me that our library had nothing about Wicca or witchcraft, and she was going to have to head back for Ann Arbor where, she told me, "people know more about these things."
It seems that Wicca originated in the first half of the twentieth century as an attempt to recreate what was believed to be an ancient indigenous European religious tradition. If you're looking for an account of all this, there's the Wikipedia entry, readily available, and fairly informative. The best current, brief, dependable overview (with bibliography) of Wicca I've found is Joanne Pearson's article "Wicca" (pp.9728-9732). in the new Encyclopedia of Religion, 2d ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Thomson-Gale, 2005) [Hekman Library ThRef BL31 .E46 2005] (This may be available to you online, if your library has the electronic version.) See also Joanne Pearson's essay,"'Witchcraft will not soon Vanish from this Earth': Wicca in the 21st Century," in Predicting Religion: Christian, Secular and Alternative Futures, ed. Grace Davie et al., 170-182 (Ashgate, 2003).
For a scholar-participant's account of Wicca, take a look at Nikki Bado-Fralick's Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual, American Academy of Religion(Oxford, 2005) [HL BL615 .B33 2005]. Here's a table of contents. The Amazon site allows you to view pages of the book, and if you do it right, you can read fairly large sections. See especially pages 32-42 (under the heading "Mapping an Ever-Changing Landscape") for Bado-Fralick's take on the "landscape" of Wicca, including its relationship to witchcraft, contemporary paganism, Wicca and the "old religion," and the role of texts in Wicca.Another fascinating perspective on Wicca is Kathryn Rountree, "The New Witch of the West: Feminists Reclaim the Crone," Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 4 (1997): 211–229. (Available, again, if you have online access to this journal).
