He was instrumental in bringing the Contemporary Pagan religion of Wicca to public attention, writing some of its definitive religious texts and founding the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca.

Biographer Philip Heselton suggested that through the nudist scene Gardner may have also met Dion Byngham ( 1896 – 1990 ), a senior member of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry who propounded a Contemporary Pagan religion known as Dionysianism.

Murray's Witch-Cult theories would provide the blueprint for the Contemporary Pagan religion of Wicca.

Goddess Spirituality, which is also known as the Goddess movement, is a Pagan religion in which a singular, monotheistic Goddess is given predominance.

Pagan Witchcraft is the largest contemporary pagan religion, having originally developed in the United Kingdom and since spread across the world.

According to its followers this organisation aims to revive and spread the Pagan religion of the Guanche people.

Following the line of visibility that the Wiccan Religious Confession, Celtiberian Tradition, imposed throughout the institution, this Tradition Wicca also established in Portugal has taken the first step and once applied for registration in the relevant Register, has just been registered and is therefore has become the first Confession Pagan recognized as religion in the history of Portugal ( source ).

All Pagans were asked to fill in their religion as " Pagan -( religion )", for example a Wiccan would write " Pagan-Wiccan " as their religion.

" Pagan " came to be equated with a Christianized sense of " epicurean " to signify a person who is sensual, materialistic, self-indulgent, unconcerned with the future and uninterested in sophisticated religion.

as " the unity of religion and politics, of spirit and nature, of god and man ", qualified by the observation that " man " in the Pagan view is always defined by ethnicity, i. e. Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Jew, etc., so that each Pagan tradition is also a national tradition.

Feuerbach goes on to postulate that the emergence of monotheism and thus the end of the Pagan period was a development which naturally grew out of Hellenistic philosophy due to the contradiction inherent in the ethnic nature of Pagan tradition and the universality of human spirituality ( Geist ), finally resulting in the emergence of a religion with a universalist scope in the form of Christianity.

There are a number of Pagan authors who have examined the relation of the 20th-century movements of polytheistic revival with historical polytheism on one hand and contemporary traditions of indigenous folk religion on the other.

The book claimed to report on the contemporary practice of Pagan religious witchcraft in England, which had supposedly survived as an underground religion for centuries.

The new state religion was to be founded on a hierarchical pantheon of Pagan Gods, based largely upon the ideas of Humanism prevalent at the time, incorporating themes such as rationalism and logic.

She has an online autobiography entitled Fly by Night, and writes for the religion section of the San Francisco Examiner on subjects related to Pagan religions.

Born in Alexandria into a poor family, Maximus was the son of Christian parents, who had suffered on account of their religion ; but whether from Pagan or Arian violence is not clear.

The book dealt with the history of the Pagan religion of Wicca, and in the preface Hutton stated that:

Hints from texts in the main game suggested that the expansion pack would have added a new story regarding resistance to the Pagan gods and followers of the old religion known as Zealans.

Baudelaire criticised both the need of religion and the mediocrity of neopagan artists in a text entitled " L ' École païenne " (" The Pagan School "):

Dianic Witchcraft and Dianic Feminist Witchcraft, is a tradition, or denomination, of the Neopagan religion of Wicca.

Dr. Leo Ruickbie, in his Witchcraft Out of the Shadows, analysed the documented evidence and concluded that Aleister Crowley played a crucial role in inspiring Gardner to establish a new pagan religion.

Moving to London in 1945, following the repeal of the Witchcraft Act of 1736 he became intent on propagating this religion, attracting media attention and writing about it in High Magic's Aid ( 1949 ), Witchcraft Today ( 1954 ) and The Meaning of Witchcraft ( 1959 ).

The pioneers of the various Wiccan or Witchcraft traditions, such as Gerald Gardner, Doreen Valiente and Robert Cochrane, all claimed that their religion was a continuation of the pagan religion of the Witch-Cult following historians who had purported the Witch-Cult's existence, such as Jules Michelet and Margaret Murray.

In the 1920s Margaret Murray theorized that a Witchcraft religion existed underground and in secret, and had survived through the witchcraft prosecutions that had been enacted by the ecclesiastical and secular courts.

Celtiberian tradition of Wicca, consisting of Fernando Gonzalez ( source ) in the 80's of the twentieth century from the Hispanic Traditional Witchcraft to which he belongs, is a structured religion through the symbiosis between " traditionalism wizard " ( inciatic and mystery ), the historical reconstructionist ( cultural and archaeological ) and " adaptationism " liturgical ( conditioning ceremonial ) of Hispanic Traditional Witchcraft, paganism, religious worship pre-Christian Celtic and Iberian mainly and those that were previously formed ( shamanism, Neolithic and Paleolithic cults ).

In 1954 Gerald Gardner published his book " Witchcraft Today " to advance his own practice of Wicca as a modern religion.

" Nonetheless, he noted that Where Witchcraft Lives was also historically inaccurate, because " she diffidently interpreted the facts that she was revealing within the framework supplied by the foremost contemporary academic expert in the early modern trials, Margaret Murray ", whose theories that Early Modern witchcraft was a surviving pre-Christian religion, have subsequently been disproved and dismissed by historians.

In the US, Buckland soon read the books The Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Margaret Murray and Witchcraft Today by Gerald Gardner, which gave him an insight into the Witchcraft religion, or Wicca as it is now more commonly known.

Among other beliefs about the religion clauses of the First Amendment, they argue that its religion clauses were not intended to include such faiths as Paganism and Witchcraft, but only monotheistic religions, and perhaps solely Christianity.

Witchcraft Today is one of the foundational texts for the religion of Wicca, along with Gardner's second book on the subject, 1959's The Meaning of Witchcraft.

The Charge of the Goddess is a traditional inspirational text often used in the neopagan religion of Wicca.

One well-known example of a bitheistic or duotheistic theology based on gender polarity is found in the neopagan religion of Wicca, which is centered on the worship of a divine couple-the Moon Goddess and the Horned God-who are regarded as lovers.

Dianic Wicca is a female born religion based upon Women's shared Blood Mysteries.

The Neopagan religion of Wicca publicly appeared in the 1940s, and Gerald Gardner introduced the Book of Shadows as a Wiccan Grimoire.

tradition in the neopagan religion of Wicca, whose members can trace initiatory descent from Gerald Gardner.

The " father of Wicca ", Gerald Gardner, who adopted Margaret Murray's thesis, claimed Wicca was a modern survival of an ancient pan-European pagan religion.

by Aleister Crowley and subsequently went on to found the Neopagan religion of Wicca.

Neo-Druidism forms the second largest pagan religion after Wicca, and like Wicca in turn shows significant heterogeneity.

Adherents. com estimates that there are roughly one million pagans worldwide ( as of 2000 ), including " Wicca, Magick, Druidism, Asatru, neo-Native American religion and others ".

On December 23, 2011, the Spanish Government officially acknowledges for the first time to Wicca as a religion, Wicca Tradition Celtiberian register in the Register of religious bodies with the reference 2560-GS / A, being the first country for Spain Europe and the second in the world after U. S., to recognize her.

Dianic Wicca is a religion that welcomes lesbian pagans and celebrates their perspectives on feminism, sexism, and women's empowerment within patriarchal culture.

As such, various modern scholars have begun to apply the term to three groups of separate faiths: Historical Polytheism ( such as Celtic polytheism, Norse Paganism, the Cultus Deorum Romanorum and Hellenic Polytheistic Reconstructionism also called Hellenismos ), Folk / ethnic / Indigenous religions ( such as Chinese folk religion and African traditional religion ), and Neopaganism ( such as Wicca and Germanic Neopaganism ).

Many of the " revivals ", Wicca and Neo-druidism in particular, have their roots in 19th century Romanticism and retain noticeable elements of occultism or theosophy that were current then, setting them apart from historical rural ( paganus ) folk religion.

The Wiccan Rede () is a statement that provides the key moral system in the Neopagan religion of Wicca and other related Witchcraft-based faiths.

While she admits to having a high regard for the mythic and gothic, she denies any solitary dedication to any one religion, including Wicca.