Witchcraft Today

Witchcraft Today presents modern witchcraft as a surviving practice rather than mere superstition, introducing the public to the religion that would become Wicca. Its central claim, framed through Margaret Murray's witch-cult thesis, is that an ancient pre-Christian fertility religion persisted in secret and remains a living tradition of ritual and magic.

Writing as a sympathetic observer and claimed initiate, Gardner describes covens, seasonal rites, and the worldview of the witches, arguing for the dignity and coherence of their practice. In sober historical terms the tradition is better understood as a twentieth-century synthesis of folk magic, Masonic and ceremonial structure, and Crowley-derived material.

Whatever its provenance, the book launched the modern Pagan revival, seeding a global movement through Gardner's covens and Book of Shadows. It brought ritual magic out of secret lodges into public, replicable practice.