A neopaganreligion that was first popularized by books written in 1949, 1954, and 1959 by Englishman Gerald Gardner, involving the worship of a horned male god and a moon goddess, the observance of eight Sabbats, and the performance of various rituals.
A twentieth-century borrowing of , from Proto-Germanic *wikkô; erroneously mispronounced as instead of the correct . The modern use of the term was introduced first as Wica, mentioned briefly in chapter 10 of Gerald Gardner's book Witchcraft Today (1954), as a collective noun ("the Wica"), allegedly used as a self-designation by practitioners of witchcraft. The spelling Wicca, again as a collective noun, was introduced and popularized by Gerald Gardner's later book, The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959).
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