Wicca and the Burning Times Myth

The Burning Times is a term used in Wicca and broader neopaganism to describe the period of European witch trials that lasted roughly from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In the version of history that became embedded in Wiccan tradition, the witch trials represented a deliberate campaign by the Christian church to exterminate a surviving pre-Christian religion; the estimated number of victims has often been stated as nine million people, most of them women and practitioners of the old ways. Both the scale and the interpretation have been substantially revised by professional historians, and reckoning honestly with what the evidence shows is valuable for any practitioner who wants to understand where modern witchcraft actually comes from.

The historical reality of the European witch trials is itself serious and disturbing enough to warrant honest attention. Current scholarly consensus, based on records examined across multiple European archives, estimates that between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed for the crime of witchcraft over approximately three centuries. That is a genuine atrocity by any measure. The majority of the accused were women, though the proportion varied considerably by region: some areas tried mostly men, others overwhelmingly women. The accused were rarely, if ever, practitioners of a coherent pre-Christian religion; they were ordinary people, frequently elderly, poor, or socially marginalized, who became targets during periods of communal stress.

History and origins

The nine million figure has a traceable history. It appears to derive from an estimate made by the German clergyman Gottfried Christian Voigt in 1784, which was taken up and transformed over the following centuries, most influentially by the nineteenth-century German feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose 1893 work Woman, Church and State cited it as evidence of systematic female oppression. The figure passed from Gage into feminist and later Wiccan literature without its problematic origins being examined.

The theoretical framework that framed the witch trials as persecution of a surviving pagan religion was developed most extensively by the British archaeologist and folklorist Margaret Murray. In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931), Murray argued that the accused witches were practitioners of an organized pre-Christian fertility religion whose god appeared at their sabbaths in animal guise. Murray’s thesis was accepted by many general readers and had enormous influence on Gerald Gardner, who incorporated it into the founding narrative of Wicca. He presented Wicca as a survival of this ancient witch religion, which had maintained itself in secret through the years of persecution.

Historians began challenging Murray’s thesis seriously from the 1970s onward, and by the 1990s it was rejected by mainstream scholarship. Careful examination of the trial records showed that accused witches did not describe practices consistent with an organized fertility religion; their confessions, often extracted under torture, described a demonological framework provided by their accusers. The diversity of what different accused people supposedly confessed to, and its correspondence to the theological anxieties of their inquisitors rather than to any consistent tradition, was inconsistent with Murray’s theory.

In practice

Many contemporary Wiccans and witches have adapted to this historical revision in thoughtful ways. Some traditions have simply dropped the claim of ancient continuity and embrace their modern origins openly, finding this honesty liberating rather than deflating. Wicca is understood as a genuine spiritual path created in the twentieth century, drawing on older materials but not requiring false claims about its lineage to have value.

The Burning Times narrative continues to hold emotional weight for many practitioners, and this is understandable. The witch trials were a real historical horror, and the majority of victims were women. The feminist insight that this pattern reflected and enforced patriarchal control over women’s bodies, knowledge, and spiritual authority has genuine validity even when separated from the claim that the victims were practicing a specific pagan religion. Honoring their memory and acknowledging the structural violence of the trials can be done honestly without adding claims the historical record does not support.

The deeper significance

What the Burning Times myth reveals, when examined closely, is the hunger within modern witchcraft for a story of persecution and survival, a narrative that validates the seriousness of the path by anchoring it in historical suffering. That hunger is real and worth understanding. Every practitioner who feels that their spiritual inclinations have been judged or suppressed by dominant culture is reaching for a history that gives their experience weight.

The honest history does provide that weight, without fabrication. The suppression of traditional healing knowledge, the criminalization of folk practices that fell outside church orthodoxy, the particular vulnerability of women who lived outside conventional social structures: these are documented features of early modern European life, and they are genuinely connected to why certain kinds of knowledge and practice were driven underground or lost. A witchcraft tradition that knows its actual history is better equipped to understand what it carries, and why.

Contemporary scholars such as Ronald Hutton, whose Triumph of the Moon (1999) is the most thorough examination of Wicca’s actual origins, have done modern paganism a great service by making this history clear. His work is not hostile to witchcraft; it is a serious scholarly engagement with how a living tradition was formed and what it drew on. Reading it alongside Gardner, Murray, and the early Wiccan texts provides a richer and more honest picture of what contemporary practitioners have actually inherited.

In myth and popular culture

The Burning Times narrative entered popular culture primarily through feminist spirituality writing of the 1970s and through Starhawk’s influential “The Spiral Dance” (1979), which described the witch trials as a nine-million-victim campaign against women’s spiritual power. This framing resonated powerfully with feminist readers and gave the trials a place in feminist political mythology. Robin Morgan’s poetry, Z Budapest’s writings, and the broader women’s spirituality movement all drew on the Burning Times as evidence of patriarchal violence against an older spiritual tradition.

The narrative entered mainstream popular culture through music, film, and fiction. Loreena McKennitt’s songs draw on the bardic and pagan traditions connected to the Burning Times aesthetic. The feminist protest song “Burning Times” by Charlie Murphy became a standard at pagan gatherings from the 1980s onward. Contemporary fantasy literature frequently revisits the witch trial period: Mary Doria Russell’s “The Sparrow,” Deborah Harkness’s “A Discovery of Witches” series, and numerous other novels engage with the intersection of magical practice and historical persecution.

Academic engagement with the witch trials has also filtered into popular awareness through works like Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” (1953), which addressed the Salem trials as an allegory for McCarthyism and has remained a fixture of secondary education curricula.

Myths and facts

Several widely repeated claims about the Burning Times do not survive historical scrutiny.

• The figure of nine million victims, which circulated extensively in Wiccan and feminist writing from the 1970s onward, has no basis in the historical record. Archival research across multiple European countries has produced an estimate of between forty thousand and sixty thousand executions over approximately three centuries, a genuine atrocity that requires no inflation to be taken seriously.
• A common belief holds that the witch trials were conducted primarily by the Catholic Church. The major peaks of execution, particularly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, occurred mostly in Protestant areas of the Holy Roman Empire under secular courts; the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions were comparatively skeptical of witch accusations.
• Margaret Murray’s theory that accused witches were practitioners of a surviving pre-Christian fertility religion is often still presented as historical fact in popular witchcraft literature. This thesis has been rejected by mainstream historians since the 1970s; examination of trial records does not support the existence of an organized pagan religion among the accused.
• It is sometimes claimed that the victims of the witch trials were primarily herbalists, healers, or wise women targeted for their knowledge. While some accused individuals had reputations as folk healers, there is no evidence that this was the primary reason for accusations; most accusations arose from community conflicts, social marginality, and the cascade dynamics of specific panics.
• Some practitioners believe that modern Wicca is a direct descendant of the religion the accused witches practiced. Historians, including Ronald Hutton in “Triumph of the Moon,” have concluded that Wicca was created in the twentieth century and is not a survival of any historical witch religion.