Our first blog post covered the folk-herbalism side of this history. This one covers the broader arc: from accusation to persecution to a specific 1950s religion to today's much wider, mostly non-religious use of the word "witch."
The witch trials
Between roughly 1450 and 1750, tens of thousands of people across Europe (historians' estimates commonly range from 40,000 to 60,000) were executed as witches, driven by religious, social, and political pressures rather than any actual organised "witch cult." Salem, Massachusetts in 1692–93 is the case most people know in the US context, but it was smaller and later than the European trials, and culturally outsized relative to its actual scale.
From persecution to legal fiction
England's Witchcraft Act of 1735 is a strange, often-misunderstood turning point: it didn't criminalise witchcraft itself. It criminalised *claiming* that someone had magical powers, treating the entire idea as fraud rather than something real to prosecute. In effect, this ended witch trials in England while keeping the practice legally invisible for another two centuries. The Act was finally repealed in 1951, replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, after lobbying largely from Spiritualists rather than witches themselves.
The birth of Wicca
Almost immediately after that 1951 repeal, a retired British civil servant named Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today (1954), followed by The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), presenting what he called "Wica" as a surviving pre-Christian religion, practised in secret for centuries. Most historians today (Ronald Hutton's research is the standard reference) treat this ancient-lineage claim sceptically, viewing Wicca instead as a genuinely new religious movement Gardner assembled from Freemasonry, Aleister Crowley's ceremonial magic, and romantic folklore of the period: creative and meaningful, but new rather than ancient. Wicca established a specific structure: a Horned God and a Triple Goddess, the eight sabbats of the Wheel of the Year, monthly Esbats tied to moon phases, an initiatory coven system, and the Wiccan Rede ("an it harm none, do what ye will"), written by Gardner's high priestess Doreen Valiente.
From Wicca to today's much broader "witchcraft"
Starting in the 1970s through the 90s, alongside feminist spirituality movements and a wave of solitary-practitioner books (Scott Cunningham's being some of the most widely read), people increasingly took up witchcraft practices (sabbats, tools, ritual structure) without formal Wiccan initiation or belief in Gardner's specific theology. Social media accelerated this dramatically: Tumblr in the early 2010s, then TikTok and Instagram "WitchTok" from the late 2010s onward, until today's landscape, where most self-described witches aren't initiated into anything at all.
The actual distinction
Wicca is a specific modern religion, founded by Gardner in the 1950s, with a defined theology and structure. Wiccan describes someone who practises Wicca specifically as their religion. Witch and witchcraft are much broader: historically a term for anyone accused of or claiming magical power, and today used by anyone practising folk magic or ritual, regardless of religion. You can be a witch and a Wiccan, a witch and a Christian, a witch and an atheist, or a witch with no religious framework attached at all. Being a witch has never required being Wiccan, even though the two get flattened into synonyms constantly online.
This blog, and Whisker & Ash generally, is written for that broader, non-Wiccan-specific audience: which is most of who's actually practising today.