The word "Wicca"
After the recent thread in NFP at Livejournal (and an... interesting... thread at circle_cast--look if you want, but please, let it die), I've got new insights on the use of the word "Wicca." This is still fairly rough; the ideas are solid in my head, but they're not parsing well into words, and seem to assume a whole lot of understood background. Let me know if this goes off on too many tangents, or fails to support itself.
From what I gather, the history goes something like this: 1950s: Gardner goes public; "the Wica" starts to make its way into public awareness. 1970s: Farrars books. Buckland. The concept of "the Old Religion, Wicca/witchcraft" starts being used. "Wicca" gets some play in occult circles as "pagan goddess-worshipping witchraft." Sometimes that's tied to a specific religion; sometimes it's more blurry. 1980s: Starhawk. (The Spiral Dance, by the way, doesn't call it Wicca. The only time it mentions "wicca" is as an ancient word meaning "witch.") Other books--Budapest, Amber K. "Witchraft" is a religion.
Up until this point, the various witchcraft traditions mostly considered each other spiritual kindred. Or rather, spiritual kith. (My new fun phrase. Help it catch on. I think it's useful.) They considered each other part of the same extended family of religions; cross-initiations were common, and sharing trad secrets across lines was not unknown--because people recognized each other as members of the same "club."
Late 1980s: Cunningham, Fitch. Wicca=witchcraft=paganism. There's some description of the details in these books, but not much. These are what catches public attention. 1990s: Ravenwolf. Witch, Wicca, it's all the same. The move The Craft came out. Suddenly, as the quote goes, "Bunch of wanna-blessed-bes. You know, nowadays every girl with a henna tattoo and a spice rack thinks she’s a sister of the Dark Ones." The Gardner-derived crowd started objecting to the mass appropriation of Wicca to no longer mean "an initiated witch of the pre-Christian British Isles pagan religion," but "a worshipper of 'the Goddess' that believes in magic(k)."
And... the ones who were previously all wiccans, witches, whatevers--those that weren't derived directly from Gardner started splitting between "We're not WICCAN, we're this other kind of witches" and "We ARE SO WICCAN, and nobody can take our word away from us!" The new wannabes joined their voices to this chorus.
Ten years of that. More newbie books telling the wannabes that they're all Wiccan--in part, 'cos that's what the authors believe; in part, 'cos "Wicca" will sell in Kansas, and "witchcraft" generally won't. "Wicca, the nature-loving peaceful religion" is a lot more publicly acceptable than "Witchcraft, the ancient occult practice that centers around a figure that they swear isn't the Christian devil, no matter what he looks like." Various court cases occur, in which "Wicca" is recognized as a religion, synonymous with "Witchraft." Much blurring of meaning.
Now... I think there's possibly sensible reasons for the blurring. (In addition to all the idiot reasons, I mean.) And I don't like that the current status is "Wiccan" meaning one of the following:
Gard-derived
Vociferous, argumentative eclectic trad with an attitude (i.e. Kaat MacMorgan)
Newbies who haven't sorted out where they fit yet, but the books used the word "Wicca" so that's what they claim, and
Flufftwits who are desparate for validation and terrified of controversy
It feels like the rest of us--the trads that aren't directly derived from Gardner, but share some of his line's history--have abandoned our family to avoid being associated with the twits.
I don't like that. If Kaat "is Wiccan;" if Wade "is Wiccan," if Fiona Horne "is Wiccan," there's no reason I'm not Wiccan. That may be my new standard for "am I Wiccan"... if the person asking thinks Ravenwolf is Wiccan, then I'm also Wiccan.