A pillar of the craft
A tradition is a path through the craft, a coherent set of beliefs, practices, and lineage that a practitioner can follow. This pillar holds the paths: Wicca and its branches, Druidry, Heathenry, Chaos magick, the many regional witchcrafts, and the folk-magick systems that grew from particular peoples and places.
The entries tell the history of each path honestly. Some, like Gardnerian Wicca, are documented modern traditions with known founders, and the entries say so warmly, as a matter of record rather than a flaw. Others reach back much further. Several, including Hoodoo, Vodou, and the various forms of brujeria, belong to living cultures and carry closed or initiatory elements. For these, the entries name the source culture clearly, explain what is open and what is closed, and give no appropriation how-to.
Choosing a path, or choosing to remain eclectic, is one of the more personal decisions in a practice. The entries here are written to inform that choice, not to push it. Read widely, notice what calls to you, and approach every living tradition with respect.
29 entries
A coven is the primary organizational unit of coven-based Wiccan and witchcraft traditions, typically comprising a small group led by a High Priestess and High Priest who guide practice, initiation, and the development of its members.
Cultural appropriation in shamanic contexts refers to the adoption of ceremonial practices, sacred objects, titles, and spiritual roles from indigenous traditions by practitioners outside those traditions, often without understanding, permission, or acknowledgement of the source community, and sometimes in ways that cause direct harm to indigenous people and their living traditions.
Deism and pantheism are two distinct theological positions that many Pagan practitioners hold, shaping how they understand divine reality, the nature of the gods, and their relationship to the natural world.
Gardnerian lineage is the unbroken chain of initiation connecting every recognized Gardnerian Wiccan to Gerald Gardner through their initiators, functioning as a form of apostolic succession that validates membership in the tradition and is treated by its practitioners as a living spiritual transmission rather than a mere historical credential.
Gerald Brosseau Gardner was the British civil servant, folklorist, and occultist who founded Wicca in the mid-twentieth century, drawing on folk magic, Freemasonry, ceremonial magic, and the witch-cult theory of Margaret Murray to create the religion that became the foundation of modern paganism.
Hard polytheism holds that the gods are genuinely distinct divine persons with independent existence; soft polytheism holds that multiple deities are aspects or faces of a single underlying divine reality, a distinction with significant practical and ethical implications for Pagan practice.
Hereditary witchcraft refers to magical and spiritual practices passed down within family lines across generations, a category that encompasses genuine folk traditions, contested historical claims, and the living reality of practitioners who did receive craft knowledge from their relatives.
The debate between inclusive and folkish Heathenry centers on whether Norse and Germanic religious practice is open to all sincere practitioners or more appropriate for people of Germanic ancestry. This is one of the most consequential ethical and theological discussions in contemporary Heathenry.
Initiatory and closed traditions are spiritual paths that require formal initiation, lineage membership, or community belonging for full participation. Understanding which traditions are closed, and why, is essential for anyone navigating the contemporary spiritual landscape ethically and respectfully.
Initiatory transmission in witchcraft refers to the idea that genuine craft power or authority is passed from person to person through formal initiation, creating lineages of practitioners that trace back to recognized founders, a concept modeled partly on the Christian theological idea of apostolic succession.
The terms paganism and neopaganism refer to overlapping but distinct categories of religious and spiritual practice, and the debate over which word applies reveals deep questions about authenticity, continuity, and identity within modern earth-based spirituality.
Paradigm shifting is the chaos magick practice of consciously adopting a belief system wholesale for a period of work, then setting it aside, treating all cosmologies as tools rather than truths. The technique is designed to loosen fixed worldviews and expand the practitioner's magical range.
Secular witchcraft is a non-theistic approach to magical practice that treats ritual, symbolism, and spellwork as psychological and cultural technologies rather than as supernatural acts, drawing on humanist philosophy, depth psychology, and the placebo literature to understand why magical practice can be effective without requiring metaphysical claims.
Solitary witchcraft is the practice of witchcraft, Wicca, or related magical traditions outside of a coven or formal group, with the practitioner serving as their own teacher, ritualist, and guide. It is among the most common forms of contemporary practice.
The Druid Revival was an 18th and 19th century movement in Britain and Wales that reimagined the ancient Celtic druids as philosophers, priests, and bearers of primordial wisdom. It produced lasting institutions and texts that shaped modern Druidry, even where its historical claims were invented.
A kindred is the primary community unit in Heathen practice: a small, committed group that gathers for blótar, sumbel, and mutual support. The kindred model reflects the clan and tribal social structures of ancient Germanic peoples and provides Heathens with the relational framework their tradition requires.
The left-hand path is a broad category in occultism referring to traditions that emphasise individual self-deification, antinomian rejection of conventional morality, and the cultivation of the self as the supreme authority, in contrast to right-hand path traditions that seek union with a divine source or conformity to a transcendent moral order.
The Lwa are the powerful ancestral and natural spirits at the center of Haitian Vodou, each with a distinct domain, personality, associated colors, offerings, and way of manifesting through possession. They are organized into nanchon (nations or families) and serve as intermediaries between human beings and the supreme but inaccessible divine source.
The Nine Noble Virtues are a set of ethical principles widely used in Asatru and Heathenry, derived loosely from Old Norse wisdom literature and formalized in the 1970s. They provide a practical moral framework for Heathen life, though their specific formulations vary by community and are not found as a list in any ancient source.
The Orishas are the divine beings at the center of Lucumí (Santería) and Yoruba religious tradition, each governing a specific domain of nature and human life. They are understood as extensions of the supreme divine, with distinct personalities, offerings, colors, and ongoing relationships with their devotees.
The spirit world in shamanic traditions refers to the non-ordinary realms of reality that shamans navigate in trance, populated by helping spirits, ancestor spirits, nature intelligences, and other non-human beings who influence human life and with whom the shaman maintains working relationships on behalf of their community.
The three degrees of initiation are the formal stages of advancement within British Traditional Wicca, marking the practitioner's deepening commitment, knowledge, and authority within the tradition from entry through full priestly standing.
The three realms of Land, Sea, and Sky form a foundational cosmological framework in Celtic and Druidic spirituality, each associated with distinct qualities, beings, and modes of sacred relationship. Modern Druids and Celtic Reconstructionists work with this structure as a living sacred map.
The Tree of Life is the central diagram of Kabbalistic and Hermetic Qabalah traditions, mapping ten divine emanations (sefirot or sephiroth) and the twenty-two paths connecting them onto a single structural image that practitioners use to understand the cosmos, the soul, and the process of spiritual development.
The two-headed doctor is a term in African American conjure and Hoodoo traditions describing a practitioner with exceptional spiritual power and double sight: the ability to perceive both the physical and spiritual dimensions simultaneously and to work effectively in both. The term carries respect and sometimes awe within the communities that use it.
WitchTok and broader online witchcraft culture represent a significant contemporary development in the transmission and practice of magic, in which short-form video, social media communities, and digital content have become primary vectors for learning, sharing, and debating magical practice.
The Hollywood image of "voodoo" as sinister doll-stabbing and zombie-raising has almost no relationship to Haitian Vodou, a living West African-derived religious tradition of great beauty and sophistication whose practitioners have suffered centuries of misrepresentation.
The Burning Times is a term used in Wicca and broader neopaganism to describe the European witch trial period, often accompanied by claims of millions executed in a deliberate campaign against a surviving pagan religion; historians have shown these claims to be inaccurate, and understanding the real history enriches rather than diminishes contemporary witchcraft practice.
The Book of Shadows is a practitioner's personal ritual journal and spell collection, originating in Gerald Gardner's mid-twentieth century Wiccan practice and adapted by every subsequent tradition into an essential tool of individual magical life.
5 entries
Blót is the primary sacrificial and offering ritual of Norse and Germanic religion, involving gifts of food, drink, and in ancient times animal sacrifice, offered to the gods, ancestors, and land spirits in exchange for blessing, protection, and reciprocal relationship. Modern Heathen blótar center on mead, food, and prayer.
Devotional polytheism is the practice of building personal, ongoing relationships with specific deities through regular offerings, prayer, ritual, and attentive service, treating the gods as genuine persons worthy of sustained relationship.
Mojo bags and root bags are small cloth pouches filled with herbs, roots, minerals, and other spiritually charged materials, carried or placed to attract luck, provide protection, draw love, or accomplish other practical spiritual goals in Hoodoo and conjure tradition. They are among the most widely known forms of African American folk magic.
Pop culture magick is the practice of working with characters, symbols, and narratives drawn from fiction, film, gaming, and popular media as the basis for magical operation, treating them as functional egregores, archetypes, or paradigms capable of producing real results.
The Great Rite is a central ritual in Wicca that enacts the sacred union of the Goddess and the God, most often performed symbolically through the joining of ritual tools. It is the central mystery of polarity in Wiccan theology.
79 entries
The 1734 Tradition is an American witchcraft path derived from the correspondence of Robert Cochrane, developed by Joseph B. Wilson in the 1960s and continuing today as a small but serious initiatory tradition emphasizing mythic and psychological depth over ceremonial form.
African traditional religions encompass the enormously diverse indigenous spiritual systems of the African continent, sharing broad family resemblances around ancestral veneration, spirit intermediaries, communal ritual, and a vision of sacred power as woven through the living world.
Alexandrian Wicca is an initiatory witchcraft tradition founded by Alex and Maxine Sanders in Britain in the 1960s. It shares much of its core structure with Gardnerian Wicca while incorporating a stronger emphasis on ceremonial magic and Kabbalah.
Sabbatic Craft is an approach to traditional witchcraft developed by the English sorcerer and author Andrew Chumbley (1967-2004) and transmitted through the Cultus Sabbati, emphasizing the nocturnal Sabbath, the arte of the Crooked Path, and the direct encounter with the divine through sorcerous trance and dream.
Anthroposophy is a Western esoteric spiritual philosophy founded by Rudolf Steiner that presents a systematic science of the spirit, offering detailed accounts of human spiritual anatomy, cosmic evolution, and the karmic laws governing reincarnation.
Appalachian folk magic is a living tradition of practical magic in the mountain regions of the eastern United States, blending British and Scots-Irish charm traditions with Cherokee and African American magical influences. It includes what practitioners call "granny magic" or "hoodoo-adjacent" mountain work.
Asatru is a modern polytheistic religion centered on the gods and spiritual worldview of the Norse and Germanic peoples. Founded in Iceland in 1972, it honors the Aesir and Vanir deities, Norse cosmology, and ancestral values through ritual, community, and ongoing scholarship.
Blue Star Wicca is an American Wiccan tradition founded in the 1970s in Pennsylvania, known for its incorporation of Alexandrian liturgy, its strong emphasis on coven community and training, and its active presence at Pagan festivals where it has introduced many practitioners to initiatory Wicca.
British Traditional Wicca (BTW) is a collective term for initiatory Wiccan lineages descended from Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders, including Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca. These traditions share a common structure of coven practice, degree initiation, and oath-bound lore.
Brujeria is the Spanish-language term for witchcraft as practised across Latin America, Spain, and Latino communities worldwide. It encompasses a diverse range of folk magical traditions rooted in the Indigenous spiritual practices of the Americas, West African religious traditions brought through the slave trade, and the folk Catholicism of Spanish colonial culture.
Brujería is a broad term for Latin American folk magic and witchcraft rooted in Indigenous, African, and Spanish Catholic traditions. It encompasses healing, protection, curse-breaking, and spiritual negotiation across many regional forms.
Candomblé is an Afro-Brazilian religion developed by enslaved West and Central African people and their descendants in Brazil, centering on the Orixás, powerful divine beings equivalent to the Orishas of Yoruba tradition. It is an initiatory religion with deep roots in African spiritual practice and a living presence in Brazilian culture.
Celtic Reconstructionism (CR) is a polytheistic spiritual tradition that draws on rigorous scholarly research into ancient Celtic cultures to rebuild historically grounded religious practice for the modern world. It prioritizes academic sources over Revival-era inventions.
Chaos Magick is a pragmatic and experimental approach to magic that emerged in Britain in the late 1970s. It rejects fixed belief systems in favour of using any model, symbol, or technique that produces results, treating belief itself as a tool that can be adopted and discarded at will.
Chaos magick is a postmodern occult tradition that treats belief itself as a tool, allowing the practitioner to adopt and discard any system to achieve results. It emerged in England in the late 1970s as a deliberate break from the dogma of earlier Western esotericism.
Core shamanism is a modern synthesis of shamanic techniques developed by anthropologist Michael Harner, drawing on cross-cultural commonalities in indigenous shamanic practice to create a learnable, non-culture-specific framework for shamanic journeying and healing work.
Cunning folk were professional practitioners of magic in Britain and early modern Europe, providing services including healing, finding lost property, identifying thieves, and countering witchcraft. They represent the oldest documented layer of British folk magic practice.
Curanderismo is a Mexican and broader Latin American healing tradition that addresses physical, emotional, and spiritual illness through herbs, prayer, ritual cleansing, and communication with saints and spiritual guides. It remains a living practice in many communities today.
Dianic Wicca is a feminist Wiccan tradition centered on the Goddess as the primary or sole divine principle, with a strong orientation toward women's spirituality and political consciousness. It was developed primarily by Zsuzsanna Budapest from the 1970s onward.
Druidry is a modern spiritual path rooted in the nature-reverence, lore, and ceremonial heritage of the ancient Celtic priestly class known as the Druids. Contemporary Druidry emphasises love of nature, creativity, ancestral connection, and direct spiritual experience.
Eclectic witchcraft is an approach to magical practice that draws from multiple traditions, systems, and sources rather than following a single defined path. Practitioners build their practice from whatever resonates most deeply, creating a personal synthesis that reflects their own nature, needs, and spiritual inclinations.
Espiritismo is a Latin American and Caribbean spiritual tradition derived from the nineteenth-century Spiritism of Allan Kardec, adapted through African, Indigenous, and Catholic influences into a distinct set of healing, mediumship, and communal spiritual practices widely observed across Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil, and their diasporas.
Folk magick is the broad category of practical magic embedded in the everyday life, customs, and oral tradition of common people across cultures and centuries. It is characterised by its accessibility, its use of available materials, its pragmatic orientation, and its deep roots in local landscape, community, and inherited custom.
Freemasonry is a fraternal initiatory tradition whose symbolic degrees and ritual drama have carried currents of Hermetic, Rosicrucian, and esoteric thought from the eighteenth century through to modern Western occultism.
Gardnerian Wicca is the original initiatory lineage of Wicca, founded by Gerald Gardner in mid-twentieth-century Britain. It is a degree-based mystery tradition transmitted through coven initiation and is considered the source from which most other Wiccan traditions descend.
Georgian Wicca is an American Wiccan tradition founded by Pat Devin in California in the 1970s, known for its eclectic and welcoming character, its open publication of liturgical material, and its emphasis on the experience of community over rigid initiatory hierarchy.
Green witchcraft is a nature-centred path focused on working with plants, herbs, trees, and the living energies of the natural world. Practitioners develop intimate relationships with the plant kingdom and use botanical knowledge as the foundation of their magical and healing work.
Haitian Vodou is a living African diaspora religion developed by enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. It centers on relationship with powerful ancestral spirits called the Lwa and is inseparable from the Haitian history of resistance, revolution, and cultural survival.
Heathenry is a modern reconstruction of the pre-Christian religions of the Germanic and Norse peoples, centred on the worship of the Aesir and Vanir gods, ancestral reverence, and the ethics of community reciprocity. It encompasses traditions including Asatru, Theodism, and Urglaawe.
Hedge witchcraft is a path centred on the practice of crossing between the ordinary world and the spirit world, or otherworld. The hedge is the symbolic boundary between these realms, and the hedge witch is a traveller and mediator who moves between them for knowledge, healing, and communication with spirits.
Hermetic Qabalah is the Western esoteric adaptation of Jewish Kabbalistic concepts, developed from the Renaissance onward and systematised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by magical orders such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It uses the Tree of Life as a universal symbolic map integrating tarot, astrology, alchemy, and ceremonial magic.
Hoodoo is an African-American folk magic tradition rooted in the spiritual practices brought by enslaved Africans to the American South, subsequently blended with Indigenous plant knowledge and European folk magic. It is a living, culturally specific tradition most authentically practised and transmitted within African-American communities.
Hoodoo is an African American folk magic tradition developed by enslaved and free Black communities in the American South, blending West and Central African spiritual practices with Indigenous American plant knowledge and elements of Protestant Christianity. It is a closed tradition with deep community roots.
Huna is a system of spiritual philosophy and self-improvement developed by American writer Max Freedom Long in the twentieth century, which Long claimed was based on ancient Hawaiian kahuna knowledge, though Native Hawaiian scholars and practitioners have questioned or rejected this claim.
Ifa is the Yoruba oracle system in which a trained priest called a Babalawo casts sixteen palm nuts or a divining chain to produce one of 256 sacred configurations (Odu), each associated with a vast body of oral poetry and practical guidance transmitted across generations and recognized by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage.
Italian witchcraft tradition, known as stregheria or the practice of the streghe (witches), encompasses a rich body of folk magic, healing, divination, and spirit work rooted in the diverse regional cultures of the Italian peninsula, from ancient Roman and Etruscan roots through to living practice.
Kabbalah is the mystical tradition of Judaism, concerned with the hidden nature of God, the structure of divine reality, and the soul's relationship to the divine. Its central symbol, the Tree of Life, is one of the most influential diagrams in the history of Western esotericism.
Kabbalah is the body of Jewish mystical teaching that seeks to understand the nature of God, the cosmos, and the human soul through study of divine emanations, sacred text, and contemplative practice. It developed over centuries within rabbinic Judaism and reached its fullest classical expression in medieval Spain and Safed.
Kitchen witchcraft is the practice of weaving magic into the acts of cooking, baking, and domestic life. The kitchen is understood as the heart of the home and the primary sacred space, and everyday acts of nourishment become conscious magical workings.
LaVeyan Satanism is an atheistic philosophy and religion founded by Anton Szandor LaVey in San Francisco in 1966, articulated in The Satanic Bible (1969). It treats Satan as a symbol of human nature, self-determination, and carnal wisdom rather than as a supernatural being, and rejects supernaturalism in favour of rational self-interest and individualism.
Luciferianism is a philosophical and spiritual tradition centred on the figure of Lucifer as a symbol or reality of enlightenment, self-deification, and the acquisition of knowledge forbidden by conventional religion. It spans atheistic, agnostic, and theistic forms and emphasises the individual's development of power and wisdom.
Mexican folk Catholicism is a syncretic spiritual tradition blending Spanish Catholic practice with Indigenous Mesoamerican religious inheritance, finding its most distinctive expressions in the veneration of folk saints and in curanderismo, the tradition of folk healing that works through prayer, herbs, and ritual cleansing.
Modern Druidry is a contemporary spiritual path inspired by ancient Celtic and pre-Celtic cultures, centering nature reverence, bardic arts, and personal development through a graded curriculum or independent practice. It is a living tradition rather than a direct reconstruction of ancient religion.
New Orleans Voodoo is a distinct African American religious and folk magic tradition that developed in Louisiana from the blending of Haitian Vodou, West African spiritual practices, French Catholicism, and Native American herbalism, given its most famous expression by Marie Laveau in the nineteenth century.
Norse Paganism encompasses the pre-Christian religious practices of the Norse and Germanic peoples of Scandinavia and the broader northern European world. Modern practitioners reconstruct and adapt this tradition through study of the Eddas, sagas, and archaeological record, maintaining living relationships with the Norse gods and engaging in ancestral practice.
Norse Reconstructionism is a scholarly approach to modern Heathenry that prioritizes rigorous use of historical, archaeological, and literary sources to rebuild religious practices of pre-Christian Norse and Germanic cultures. It sits within the broader Heathen community as its most source-critical wing.
Palo Mayombe is an African diaspora religion developed in Cuba from the spiritual traditions of the Bantu-speaking peoples of Central Africa, particularly the Kingdom of Kongo. It centers on working with ancestral spirits through the nganga, a sacred vessel, and is a strictly initiatory and closed tradition.
The pellar tradition is a distinct form of British cunning craft rooted in Cornwall, where the pellar (a corruption of "expeller") served as the community's magical healer, witch-finder, and protector against harmful magic. It is one of the most regionally specific forms of the broader British cunning folk tradition.
Radical Faeries is a loosely organized movement at the intersection of queer identity and earth-based spirituality, founded in 1979 by Harry Hay, Don Kilhefner, and Mitch Walker. It centers on the sacredness of queer consciousness and celebrates the divine through play, beauty, and community.
Northern Tradition Shamanism is a modern spirit-worker path developed primarily by Raven Kaldera, drawing on Norse and Germanic heathen cosmology and the practice of seidr to create a contemporary framework for spirit contact, ancestor work, and soul healing within a northern European spiritual framework.
Reconstructionist paganism is an approach to reviving pre-Christian polytheistic religions through careful scholarship, aiming to practice something historically grounded rather than eclectic or invented, while acknowledging the gaps that make perfect historical reconstruction impossible.
Rootwork and conjure are terms used within African American folk magic traditions to describe the practical spiritual work of preparing herbal and mineral formulas, mojo bags, and ritual workings to affect outcomes in daily life. Both terms are closely related to Hoodoo and carry specific community meaning.
Santería, more accurately called Lucumí or La Regla de Ocha, is an African diaspora religion developed by Yoruba-descended enslaved people in Cuba, centering on the Orishas and a rich system of initiation, divination, and communal practice. It is an initiatory tradition with deep African roots and living communities worldwide.
Scottish witchcraft tradition is shaped by the country's rich fairy faith, extensive witch trial records, and Gaelic folk magic practices. The fairy beings of Scottish belief were not whimsical creatures but powerful, ambivalent neighbors who required careful relationship and respect.
Sea witchcraft is a water-centred magical path drawing on the tides, storms, and vast powers of the ocean. Practitioners work with sea water, sand, shells, driftwood, and the spirits of the deep, finding in the ocean a mirror for the unconscious mind and a source of both nurturing and formidable magical force.
Seax-Wica is a Wiccan tradition founded by Raymond Buckland in 1973, drawing on Saxon cultural and mythological material while departing from British Traditional Wicca in its democratic structure and explicit permission for self-initiation.
Secular witchcraft is the practice of witchcraft and magic without a theistic or spiritual framework. Secular witches engage with magical techniques, ritual, symbolism, and natural correspondences as psychological, symbolic, or practical tools rather than as communication with deities or literal spiritual forces.
Siberian and Central Asian shamanism encompasses the indigenous spiritual traditions of a vast region extending from the Urals to the Pacific, in which specialists known by various local names (including the Tungus word "shaman") mediate between the human community and the spirit world through trance, song, drumming, and ceremonial action.
The Spiritual Baptist tradition, also called the Shouter Baptists, is an Afro-Caribbean syncretic Christian religion rooted in Trinidad and Tobago that combines evangelical Protestant practice with African spiritual inheritance, producing a distinctive tradition of mourning, pilgrimage, and Spirit possession within a Christian framework.
Reclaiming is a tradition of Wicca-influenced feminist earth-based spirituality founded in San Francisco in the early 1980s, associated particularly with the writer and activist Starhawk. It combines magical practice with political activism and collective, non-hierarchical community structure.
Stregheria is the Italian witchcraft tradition, drawing on folk magic, spirit work, and the pre-Christian religious heritage of Italy. In its modern form it was substantially shaped by Raven Grimassi, who claimed to draw on his family's southern Italian folk tradition and who published extensively on the subject from the 1980s onward.
The Church of Satan is the organisation founded by Anton Szandor LaVey in San Francisco on Walpurgisnacht 1966, the institutional home of LaVeyan Satanism, and the oldest continuously operating formal Satanist organisation. It treats Satan as a symbol of individualism, carnality, and rational self-interest rather than as a supernatural being.
The Feri Tradition is an American initiatory witchcraft tradition founded by Victor and Cora Anderson in California in the mid-twentieth century. It is known for its emphasis on personal power, ecstatic practice, deep animism, and the cultivation of Faery consciousness, a direct and often demanding encounter with sacred otherness.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a late Victorian initiatory magical order that synthesized Qabalah, tarot, astrology, and ceremonial magic into the most influential system of Western esotericism produced in the modern era.
The Illuminates of Thanateros is the primary formal magical order of chaos magick, founded in England by Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin in 1978. It organises group ritual work around chaos magick principles without imposing a fixed theology.
The New Age movement is a broad, decentralized spiritual current that emerged in Western culture in the 1970s and 1980s, drawing on Theosophy, Eastern religions, alternative medicine, channeled teachings, and Western esotericism to offer a personalized, experience-centered approach to spiritual development outside traditional religious institutions.
OBOD is the world's largest Druid order, offering a graded home-study course through the three grades of Bard, Ovate, and Druid. Founded in 1964, it has guided students in more than 90 countries through a nature-centered spiritual curriculum.
The Ordo Aurum Solis is a Western mystery school that transmits the Ogdoadic tradition, a Hermetic and Neoplatonic magical lineage distinct from the Rosicrucian stream of the Golden Dawn, emphasizing Greek philosophical and theurgical roots.
The Rosicrucians are a loosely connected series of esoteric orders and movements inspired by three anonymous seventeenth-century German manifestos that announced a secret brotherhood possessing ancient Hermetic wisdom. Whether the original brotherhood existed is uncertain, but its influence on Western esotericism has been profound and lasting.
The Satanic Temple is a non-theistic religious organisation founded in the United States around 2012-2013 that uses Satanic symbolism as a vehicle for political activism, the defence of religious liberty, and the separation of church and state. It is legally recognised as a religion in the United States and is distinct from the Church of Satan.
The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, with the aim of forming a universal brotherhood of humanity, investigating unexplained natural laws and the powers latent in humanity, and studying comparative religion, philosophy, and science.
The Western Mystery Tradition is the broad lineage of European esoteric philosophy and practice that draws on Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, alchemy, ceremonial magic, and Gnosticism, passing through the Renaissance, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and the nineteenth-century magical revival into the present.
Theistic Satanism is a broad category of religious practices in which Satan is venerated as an actual spiritual being rather than a philosophical symbol. It encompasses a diverse range of traditions and individual practitioners, from those who work within structured organisations to solitary practitioners with personal theological frameworks.
Thelema is a Western esoteric tradition founded by Aleister Crowley in 1904, centered on the Law of Thelema and the pursuit of one's True Will as the supreme spiritual act.
Traditional witchcraft is an umbrella term for forms of witchcraft that claim descent from, or alignment with, pre-Wiccan European folk magic and cunning craft. It tends to be more regionally specific, spirit-focused, and animist than Wicca, and it places less emphasis on the religious veneration of a God and Goddess pairing.
Umbanda is a Brazilian syncretic religion that emerged in the early 20th century, blending Afro-Brazilian spiritual traditions, Spiritism, Indigenous elements, and Catholic devotion into a distinct new form. It centers on spirit mediumship and is one of Brazil's most widely practiced religions.
Vodou is an Afro-Caribbean religion of the Haitian people, born from the West and Central African spiritual traditions of enslaved people who fused their heritage with elements of Catholicism under French colonial rule. It is a fully formed religion with theology, priesthood, initiation, and a living community of practice.
Wicca is a modern Pagan religion centred on reverence for nature, the cycle of the seasons, and the worship of a Goddess and God. It was developed in mid-twentieth-century Britain and has since grown into one of the world's most widely practised contemporary Pagan paths.
Yoruba traditional religion is one of the largest and most influential indigenous African religious traditions, centered on the Supreme Being Olodumare, the divine intermediary Orishas, and the Ifa oracle system, and the spiritual ancestor of Candomble, Santeria/Lukumi, and other major African diaspora traditions.
11 entries
Alex Sanders (1926-1988) was a British occultist and witch who founded Alexandrian Wicca with his wife Maxine Sanders in the 1960s. A charismatic and controversial figure, he called himself King of the Witches and brought Wicca considerable public attention.
Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) was a British artist and occultist whose personal magical system, Zos Kia Cultus, provided the foundational techniques for what would become chaos magick, particularly his method of sigilisation and his concept of the subconscious as the engine of magical action.
Doreen Valiente (1922-1999) was a British witch and poet whose writings gave Wicca its foundational liturgy, including the Charge of the Goddess. She is the most important literary figure in the history of modern witchcraft.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) was a Russian-born occultist and writer who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 and authored The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled, works that synthesised Eastern and Western mystical traditions and reshaped the landscape of Western esotericism for generations.
Marie Laveau (c. 1801-1881) was a free Black Creole woman of New Orleans who became the most celebrated Voodoo Queen in American history, wielding spiritual, social, and political influence across racial lines in antebellum Louisiana and remaining a potent figure of veneration and legend today.
Peter Carroll is the British occultist and writer who cofounded the Illuminates of Thanateros and wrote Liber Null and Psychonaut, the foundational texts of Chaos Magick, establishing a model of magical practice based on probability manipulation, paradigm shifting, and the creative use of belief as a tool.
Robert Cochrane (1931-1966) was an English witch and cunning man whose distinctive and uncompromising approach to the craft, expressed through correspondence, poetry, and the working coven he led, became one of the foundational voices of traditional witchcraft as distinct from Wicca.
Scott Cunningham was an American Wiccan author whose warm, accessible books on solitary practice, herb magic, crystal magic, and earth power reached millions of readers and helped establish the eclectic, self-initiated approach to Wicca as a fully valid path.
Raven Grimassi was an American author and teacher who developed Stregheria, a modern witchcraft tradition he presented as rooted in pre-Christian Italian folk religion, and whose many books shaped the broader revival of Italian-heritage paganism.
Victor Anderson (1917-2001) was an American witch, poet, and visionary who co-founded the Feri Tradition with his wife Cora, creating an initiatory witchcraft path marked by its ecstatic mysticism, alignment with wild and feral powers, and influence on Starhawk and eclectic modern witchcraft.
Zsuzsanna Budapest, known as Z Budapest, founded Dianic Wicca in the early 1970s, creating a feminist witchcraft tradition centered on the Goddess, women's mysteries, and female spiritual empowerment, and she remains one of the most influential and contested figures in the history of contemporary paganism.
2 entries
The Charge of the Goddess is the central liturgical text of Wicca, written primarily by Doreen Valiente in the 1950s. Spoken in the voice of the Goddess herself, it is the most important and widely recognized piece of Wiccan sacred literature.
The Zohar is the central text of Jewish Kabbalistic literature, a mystical commentary on the Torah written primarily in Aramaic. It appeared in Spain in the late thirteenth century and has shaped the course of Jewish mystical teaching ever since.