Wicca or witch?

Most people do not know what is the difference between the two phrases, so I will try to explain it.

If I would state it shortly: every Wiccan is a witch, but not every witch is Wiccan. That is, Wicca itself is just one of the many paths of witchcraft.

Witchcraft’s definition is: a system that works with the spirits of nature, including demotic traditions. Contrarily, Wicca is a religion, which has been devised in the 1900s and got notoriety by Gerard B. Gardner. Therefore, while witchcraft has no unitary faith and laws, then Wicca has. Wiccan people believe in a God couple (except Dianic traditions who worship mostly a Goddess only), and accept the Rede. Of course, we can find some witchy traditions who worship a God couple but it is not a common component of the witchcraft itself.

(Image source: Google)

It is a main difference too that witches do not believe in the threefold law and karma (some of them does, but it is not common). Wiccan people do believe in the threefold law, and say every time: what you give, you get back three times.

While Wiccan have an unitary law system, therefore it is a huge catachresis to call someone “Christian Wicca”. The Christian God and Satan cannot get inlayed to the Wiccan system. It’s like I would call someone “satanic buddhist” or “hindi jew”… Of course the traditional witchcraft can be inserted into the Christian traditions (anyway, many Christian casts spells and work with magic, even the priests too, I will write about it in the next post), of course you can agree with the Wiccan Rede and the threefold law too, but the Christian God doesn’t like it when you adore other Gods or Goddesses, so you cannot have (this) two religion simultaneously.

There is a lot more paths in witchcraft than Wicca. For example, shamanism, hermetism, satanism, druidism, hedge witchcraft, kitchen witchcraft, herbalism etc. The main thing of them is to work with one or more nature spirits. You can be a witch if you believe in your religion (judasim, christianity, anything) and inlay some magical traditions in your everyday routine, like you use herbs or value the spirits of the forest you go in to collect some herbs BUT you do not throw away your original religious system. You can be a witch when you do not worship a God or Goddess or God couple, but you do some magical practice.

First and last: Wicca is a modern religion with laws and traditions, but witchcraft does not have a religious system, does not have commonly accepted laws and could be various because of the diversity of magical practices.