Mistaking Influence for Composition

Dominance, Masks, Discernment, and the Less Palatable Side of Western Witchcraft

A friend's Facebook thread exploded a bit this week, wherein she complained about Wicca bashing. "OMGs, the idiotic blind hatred for Wicca from ignorant Pagans is bizarre. The ironic thing is that they usually cast circles, call the quarters, and celebrate the sabbats—all of which come from Wicca." —Taffy Dugan, Elder Priestess. And wow. I want to agree with her, and with Jason Mankey, and with the other Gardnerians in the comments.

Especially as a response to the person who claimed "Wiccans aren't witches. I don't care for Abrahamic religions either tbh. Does that make me Abrahamophobic? I like many people who are Abrahamic. I don't know. Also Wicca is Abrahamic in substance, and was created by a man, and masculine-centric."

First off, this guy posting about Abrahamic masculine-coded Wicca was definitely not coming from an informed position. The discussion delved into appropriation and Wicca bashing. Not particularly original concerns, but ones that lack discernment. The pushback was swift and basically accurate. Multiple elders in initiatory Wiccan traditions pointed out that Wicca is not an Abrahamic religion, that Doreen Valiente's contributions fundamentally shaped the tradition, and that there is a massive difference between internet Wicca and the initiatory traditions of Wicca.

But where this gets interesting is that, like any good attack, there is just enough to it to be worth discussing. A small kernel of truth that, perhaps, it's easier to leave unacknowledged. I'm just really terrible at that little sleight of hand. To me it's worth opening the can of worms—but not on Facebook, where nuance and depth go to die.

So... let's break it down a bit, shall we?

Wicca isn't Abrahamic. The Western Occult Tradition absolutely is. And there is a difference, a huge one. One worth discussing, because pretending that Wicca is untouched by the dominant culture is how we stay trapped in reaction rather than free from it.

The Water We Swim In

I'm a Wiccan. I'm a Western Occultist. I'm a village witch who learned magic from my Christian grandmothers. I learned hexing and healing, the importance of the fire festivals like Samhain, old remedies and ways of being, and traditions from both sides of my family. But my grandmothers wouldn't have called it witchcraft. They, and many like them, would have been horrified by the term, even if they could read tea leaves and storms, charm warts, or share other talents. Witch to them was not an accolade; in fact, I suspect they'd be horrified to be known publicly as such. But by our standards? Absolutely witches.

My mother will acknowledge we come from a long line of witches, though she is Christian. But here's the thing: I don't think the magic users who came before us truly deserve that title—not as they would have understood it. "Witch" meant something different then. It was an accusation, a threat, and a way for someone to take from you what is yours. It reduced sovereignty and could get you killed. The magic they practiced was part of practical survival and woven with Christian elements. They wouldn't have recognized our post-modern reclamation of the word, this identity that we now claim and have built up with pride.

Magic, in my world, is also steeped in antiquities and old things. Not just Wicca or modern paganism. It is history, nature, and science. It is alchemy and philosophy, art and fiction. And I live in a world that is inescapably Abrahamic-coded, even when I'm practicing traditions that predate or postdate or exist outside of the Abrahamic framework.

Let me explain: The Enlightenment gave us access to so much Greek and Roman philosophy. It opened up Hermeticism, alchemy, and other mystery traditions. But it was because these texts and ideas were "discovered" by people dominated by the church. (Ronald Hutton's Triumph of the Moon discusses this to some extent, as does Wouter Hanegraaff's Western Esotericism.) The grimoire tradition is steeped in Christian theology; things like the Key of Solomon (which definitely predates Christianity) are almost exclusively discussed in Christian terms, full of psalms and angels and the authority of Yahweh, the god of Abraham. (Owen Davies' Grimoires: A History of Magic Books delves into that idea deeper, as do John Dee's biographers and interpreters.) The Kabbalah and the Tree of Life come from Jewish mysticism but were adopted and adapted by Christian occultists long before Dion Fortune brought it into the modern occult tradition. (See writers like Hanegraaff or Antoine Faivre for more in-depth discussion of the Christian Kabbalah.) The search for the philosopher's stone, for the Holy Grail—our art—it's all filtered through Abrahamic cosmology. The Enlightenment itself was, and that is why it succeeded in spite of the dominant culture: because it was a part of it.

Western Occult Tradition isn't strictly Christian or Jewish or Islamic at its core. Nor are the Wiccan practices, or the practices from other mystical societies. Magical technologies, and systems, and roots spiral back to times and places that long predate Abrahamic faiths. The trouble is the versions of those tools that we have access to, the words and language we have to describe them, and the frameworks that we build upon—they have all been shaped, sometimes very obviously, by the dominant culture of the time. We may consider ourselves non-Abrahamic, secular, and outside of that structure, but the reality is it shapes where we are now.

For a more direct picture, let's take a trip to our local botanica. This isn't a church supply store; these stores are living archives of resistance and adaptation. Look around and count the saints. Are they here for the Catholics, or for the practitioners of pre-Columbian and African diasporic traditions? Those saints are more than devotions; they're masks worn by Orisha, by Indigenous spirits, by ancestors who survived colonialism's violence hiding in plain sight. When you're seeing the saints, you're seeing the aftermath of the brutal violence of colonialism and the slave trade, which meant even sacred beings needed masks to survive. Resistance. A strategy born out of genocide, enslavement, and cultural erasure. That these traditions survived at all, that practitioners found ways to keep the sacred alive beyond the oppression, is a testament to their strength. The botanica is a place to truly see extraordinary resilience and spiritual integrity. The botanica honors traditions that refused to die, that wove African, Native, and European threads into something new, powerful, and deeply resilient. That deserves our deepest respect and admiration, not romanticism, and definitely not condemnation for the Abrahamic elements.

We're pretty far away from Facebook now. And this is why spaces like Facebook fail us: they flatten this history into slogans. They can't hold the weight of survival, syncretism, or the scar tissue that holds a people together. So let's return from our foray into the botanica and explain why it was helpful.

I live in Texas. My kid goes to public school where the Ten Commandments are posted on the wall by statute. That's nothing compared to what we're discussing here, but it's essential to understanding why the appropriation discussion is so important. We need to sit with the reality that spiritual traditions do not exist outside of their history. I especially feel like this is true with white practitioners; often there is a romanticized pre-Christian European faith that is somehow "pure" or uncontaminated by Abrahamic influence. Missing the entire reality of how colonialism, Christianity, power, and also the cultural context of those who documented, discovered, and analyzed any fragments shaped the creation or revival of these paths. There is not a pure, unadulterated witch cult that predates Christianity in Western occultism and has been preserved unchanged. Sorry, Margaret Murray.

Back to Wicca—What It Is and Isn't

Let me be super clear: Wicca is not Abrahamic. Wicca isn't ancient.

Wicca is a modern religion that honors the God and Goddess, celebrates the Wheel of the Year, and works within a framework of polarities and cycles. Gerald Gardner founded it, yes—a man—but he couldn't have actually made it work without Doreen Valiente and many other priestesses. Wicca draws from folk magic, ceremonial magic, romanticism, and its own innovations to build something new, not Abrahamic. (Ronald Hutton's work goes into great detail and depth on what Wicca is and what it is not. I would suggest both The Triumph of the Moon for more depth on the history of Wicca and The Stations of the Sun for more depth on the ritual calendar.)

But—and this is important—Wicca is influenced by the Western occult tradition, which itself is soaked in Abrahamic language and structure. The ceremonial magic that fed into Wicca? Rooted in grimoires written by Christian magicians. The Qabalah that shows up in many traditions' teachings? Jewish mysticism filtered through Christian occultists through Hermetic lodges. (See Hanegraaff's work on Golden Dawn and Hermetic Order influences.) Even the concept of "calling the quarters" has echoes in ceremonial magic's use of angelic guardians and elemental hierarchies.

Does that make Wicca Abrahamic? No.

Does it mean we're entirely separate from that influence? Also no.

And here's the thing: acknowledging influence doesn't diminish the power of what we practice. The dominant culture leaves fingerprints on everything, but those fingerprints aren't the substance. They're the language we inherited, the structures we sometimes work within or against, the cosmology we're often translating from even as we build something new.

Traditional Witchcraft and the Invention of Tradition

This gets even messier when we talk about "Traditional Witchcraft." In common parlance, it's often positioned as older, more authentic, less influenced than Wicca. But here's an uncomfortable truth: most of what we call Traditional Witchcraft is derivative of Wicca, not the other way around. (Hutton's Triumph of the Moon discusses the genealogy of modern witchcraft traditions.)

The cunning folk, the wise women, the folk magic practitioners of history? Most of them were Christians. They went to church. They used psalms and prayers alongside their charms. They would not have identified as witches—that was the word used to accuse and condemn them, not a word they claimed with pride. (Owen Davies' Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History and Hutton's The Witch: A History of Fear discuss the construction of the witch figure.) The modern identity of "witch" is a 20th-century construction. (Hutton's Triumph of the Moon and Sabina Magliocco's Witching Culture explore modern Pagan identity formation.)

We look to the witch trials as evidence, to the malifica, to these glimpses of historical practice. But we're often projecting our modern understanding backward, seeing what we want to see rather than what was actually there. (Hutton's The Witch addresses misreadings of historical witch trial records.)

I'm not saying there's no continuity, no genuine folk practices handed down. I learned them from my grandmother and her mother before her. But I'm saying that the framing—the idea of witchcraft as a cohesive, pre-Christian survival—that's modern. That's us building something new and draping it in the authority of the old.

And that's okay. Magic doesn't need to be ancient to be powerful. But we need to be honest about it.

Freedom Through Understanding

Here's where I'm going with all this, and why it matters:

Refusing to acknowledge Abrahamic influence keeps you trapped in reaction to it. Understanding the influence gives you the freedom to work with, against, or through it intentionally.

If you left organized religion for witchcraft—and so many of us did—there's often this impulse to reject everything associated with it. To insist on absolute separation, total originality, zero contamination. But that's not how culture works. That's not how magic works.

The influence of a dominant culture does not erase the power and presence of the minority. The mask is not the meat. But learning to move comfortably within systems—even systems shaped by what we're moving away from—gives us the tools to deconstruct them. To filter substance from chaff. To discern what's important and refuse to give power to what isn't.

This kind of sovereignty—the insistence that you decide what holds power in your practice—shows up everywhere from chaos magic to feminist witchcraft to rootwork to countless other traditions. It's not unique to any one path, and I didn't learn it from Discordianism (though I love their radical commitment to it). It's fundamental to magic itself: the understanding that symbols and systems have the power we give them, no more and no less.

The grimoires can teach you structure without binding you to their Christian cosmology. The Qabalah can map consciousness without requiring you to worship the Ein Sof. Saints can be worked with as masks for older powers, or honored in their own right, or set aside entirely.

Magic is bigger than any label we give it. And you are sovereign in how you move through it.

Being Comfortable in Complexity

People and religion are complicated. My grandmother was Christian and taught me magic. The botanica blends Orisha and saints—not as aesthetic choice but as testament to survival, to the unbreakable will of people who refused to let their traditions die even under unimaginable oppression. Wicca is influenced by ceremonial magic influenced by Christian grimoires influenced by older Egyptian and Greek practices influenced by who-knows-what-else spiraling back through time.

None of that makes Wicca Abrahamic.

None of that makes Western occultism invalid.

None of that means we're forever tainted by the dominant culture.

It just means we're human. We inherit, we adapt, we create. We live in a world where Christianity shaped the language and the structures, even for those of us building something outside of it. And acknowledging that—really sitting with the complexity of it—doesn't weaken our practice.

It strengthens it.

Because when you know what's yours and what's inherited, when you can trace the threads back and see where they come from, you can choose consciously rather than react unconsciously. You can keep what serves you and release what doesn't. You can honor the mess without being trapped by it.

So yes: Wicca is not Abrahamic. The people defending it in that thread were right.

We're all swimming in water shaped by the dominant culture.  The water is flowing through a canyon formed by our history, and carved through the current.  That water is full of minerals, pretending its purely hydrogen and oxygen is missing a large part of what makes it nourishing.  And pretending we’re not wet doesn't make us dry.

The work is learning to swim with intention. In water flowing through the spaces contours of history shaped by cultures before us.  It is our job to learn that history, to know the currents. To build our own vessels and choose our own shores.

That's the real magic.