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First of all, in popular usage the word “witch” has a bad reputation and we get tired of going through the same old explanations all the time. Better just to keep quiet. In fact, a lot of us prefer the term Wiccan because it doesn’t have the same connotations. However, for the public, it has no associations, which still leaves us having to explain ourselves.
Some of us want to use and reclaim the term witch. It’s unfair that it has come to mean a person who does evil things. Medieval Europeans accused of witchcraft were far more sinned against than sinning. The crimes they were accused of sound silly to modern ears — making your neighbor’s cow run dry, or his “member” no longer work, or kissing the devil’s backside. The punishment meted out for such imaginary crimes was unspeakable — days of torture followed by being burned alive. But even today it’s the witch who is still thought of as evil while church and state come off having been merely misguided.
Some ideas about the old witches, that they knew about herbs and that they flew through the air to their meetings (even while being observed sleeping), sound like traces of old shamanic tribal practices that were probably as widespread in pre-Christian Europe as elsewhere. Those who practiced those old ways, and not necessarily the poor wretches caught up in the horrors of the witch-hunts, are the people we really look back to. Christianity was a religion of the Mediterranean and of cities which was imposed, often by force, upon the pagans and heathens (both terms meaning country-folk) of Europe, and we’re merely going back to our roots. However, even today such activities, if no longer blasphemous, are at least peculiar and people tend to keep quiet about their offbeat interests.
Another reason for secrecy has to do with the nature of Wiccan practice and ritual. We call it the art of witchcraft, really meaning that it’s an art and a craft — a creative, artistic endeavor as much as religious. Most artists don’t talk about works-in-progress because that bleeds off the energy they need to put into them, and this is also one of the principles of magic. (Magic being partly a kind of active prayer, and partly a regime of self-knowledge and self-improvement — but both these aspects are undertaken in non-standard, i.e., peculiar ways.) In magic the ability to keep silent is considered a discipline and a virtue. That was true of society in general in the past, but modern culture is much more oriented towards openness and suspicious of secrecy.
Wicca reflects those two attitudes in a split between the original Gardnerian covens and the contemporary non-traditional groups.
Traditional Gardnerian groups have a system of revealing their teachings to newcomers in a progressive fashion and they conscientiously guard their innermost secrets from non-members. This should not be regarded as sinister. They have descended from and continue to maintain a small-group, mystery religion appealing only to a minority of spiritual seekers.
However, right from the beginning of modern Wicca, starting with Gerald Gardner himself, the movement has garnered a lot of publicity. Many people have become interested, and as a result Wicca and Paganism in general are thought to constitute the fastest-growing religious movement in North America today. Most of these people have no opportunity to learn from traditional groups. Instead they get together and create their own non-traditional groups (often called “eclectic”), using the Gardnerian material that has been published as a basis on which to build their own innovative practices, and many of these people have no interest in traditional secrecy.
Sometimes there is confusion between the ideas of secrecy and mystery. I cannot tell you what goes on in a ritual — not because I won’t, but because I literally cannot. Meaning that you will have to experience it for yourself. But this is true of many things in life.
Of course witchcraft is associated with the occult, another scare-word. But occult merely means hidden. Occultists are people who attempt to explore and explain the metaphysical mysteries, but their efforts sometimes tend to yet further obfuscation. Which makes them seem suspect and so further compounds the problem (“They must be hiding something — and if they’re hiding something, it must be bad.”)
And there is yet another concept that gets confused with secrecy. “In fact the craft is not secret, but private,” according to Graham Harvey in Contemporary Paganism (New York University Press, 1997). We do not have church buildings where public services are held — we meet in people’s homes. And every group does its own thing and builds up its own “traditions” that give it history and cohesiveness, like a family does.
However, we are much less private than we used to be. We do have open rituals in some places, and there are festivals at regular intervals all summer across the continent which are open to anyone. Bookstores have whole sections devoted to witchcraft and also to ceremonial magic (a practice from which witches have drawn a lot), as well as every facet of the occult. And we at the Pagan Federation are trying with these information papers to inform the public. There are few secrets any more. And not much privacy. But maybe still a bit of mystery.