Sincerely held beliefs:

They aren't. Here's the facts. "Wiccans", "Neopagans" and such like, tend to be young, American and university educated. University educated people don't usually believe in things which are, on the face of them, absolutely untrue. The creation myths, cosmogonies and rituals of all pagan religions are all ludicrous. Earth Mothers, naked magick, Crow Spirits -- any attempt to look deeply into the content of the hotchpotch of half-baked fairy stories and horror movie cliches which make up the average pagan's belief system comes up against a flat wall of incredulity pretty quickly. Nobody of even average intelligence could possibly actually believe any of this to be literally true. Therefore, by syllogism, the vast majority of so-called "Wiccans" are not sincere in what they claim to believe.

This point is important, so it bears analysis. Not only are the beliefs of Wiccans ridiculous to the point of risibility, they're also provably fabricated and internally inconsistent. The entire religion of Wicca was created out of whole cloth in 1952 by a British Civil Servant called Gerald Gardner. Therefore, for example, the First Church of Jesus Christ, Elvis are on a more solid footing than the Wiccans, given that Elvis is both older and more historically real than anything in Wicca. And, furthermore, every half-educated Wiccan knows that this is the case.

It gets better. When Gardner invented neopaganism, he just put it together from all the bits he liked from the Penguin Library of Mythology. So Wicca has bits of Northern Italian folklore, bits of the Magick of Aleister Crowley (mainly Jewish mysticism), bits of Greek elemental symbolism (Thales, 500BC) and the whole thing suffused with a miasma of "Celtic" imagery, referring to a gang of Austrian savages who ended up in Galicia, with no culture, only the most extremely dubious historical provenance and the most tenuous of connections to the people who walk round calling each other "Celts" today. Plus a load of ritual nudity which was very certainly never in the originals. It says something that Scientology and Wicca were invented at roughly the same time; while the American Hubbard came up with a money-making machine that has a proven record of effecting miracle narcotics addiction cures, the best the Brits could come up with was a Carry on Camping version of the Bacchanalia we all learn in third year Latin.

Not only that, but the main creed of the "neopagan" movement is "An it hurt none, do as you will", which plagiarises Crowley, smuggles a bit of Chaucerian Middle English into a supposedly pre-Christian tradition and directly contradicts the two things we know for certain about the actually existing pagans; a) that they had many ritual taboos, so they didn't think "do as you will" and b) that they didn't care about hurting people. It is no exaggeration to say that the main works of Celtic literature are almost entirely concerned with the subject of killing other people and stealing their cows. When they don't deal with the equally mystical and spiritual subject of getting drunk and waking up in a ditch.

A tradition

Put it this way. Nobody was brought up Wiccan. Nobody had their children named at a "blooding ceremony" straight after the "hand-fasting", nobody took their children to campfires instead of Sunday School and nobody sat up night after night teaching their little ones enough Chaucer to give them a hope of understanding what "an you hurt none" means. Or if they did, then the social services intervened pretty quickly and quite right too. Unlike the Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Muslim religions, there is nobody whose neopagan "beliefs" locate them in a long line of believers starting with their parents, and their parents' parents.

Of course there isn't. Simply to pose the possibility is to see it as ridiculous. People don't become Wiccans in order to carry on the beliefs of their parents. People become Wiccans in order to offend their parents, to try to extract some revenge on Mum and Dad for the terrible crime of having financially supported them for all of their fourteen years of life. There have never been and will never be any second-generation Wiccans, because there is simply no point in being a Wiccan if it isn't going to wind up Ma and Pa. The pagan "tradition" is the actual antithesis of a tradition. Which is why telling a Wiccan to stop wearing his severed rabbit head or his inverted pentagram is absolutely nothing like removing the cross from a Christian school or depriving a Jew of his Star of David. One of these things is to strip a human being of his identity, to remove the very essence of what is important about his humanity. The other is just to tell a silly little child (of whatever age) not to bare his bottom in public.

Way of Life

Wiccanism, like the organised simper which goes in the West by the name of "Buddhism", is a religion which, unusually, makes no practical demands whatever on its adherents. A Wiccan doesn't go to hell if they are stopped from making silly hand signs at the customers in McDonalds, in the way that a Muslim can sincerely believe himself to be in danger of if provision is not made for him to make Umrah. Suited to the intellectually flabby, scruffy, lazy slacker teenagers who believe in it, Wicca is not a religion which gives a code by which to live one's life. It has no observances, fasts or obligations to charity. All it is, is a style of dress, a calculated giving of offense to Christians, and the occasional excuse for a booze-up for people too dull or inhibited to be able to open a bottle of whisky without turning it into a piece of amateurish performance art. That's not a religion. It's a pose. And, of course, and not coincidentally, an excuse to ensure that there's no black people invited to your fraternity parties because they're not "Celtic" enough.

So then, are we really, seriously, meant to believe that this half-dignified collection of Santa Claus myths is to be given the same status as the great religions of the world? Wicca isn't important to anybody. Nobody would ever lay down their life for Wicca; very few would sacrifice their Abercrombie & Fitch trenchcoats for the cause of the Goddess. Anyone looking at the site of a Wiccan party the morning after knows that the genuine regard which the neopagans have for the earth doesn't even stretch to picking up their own beer cans and condoms. So when an employer, or a teacher, tells a scruffy teenager to clean up their act, it's an injustice of the scale of telling a punk to wash their hair, not the first step to a pogrom. And the American Civil Liberties Union really ought to find something better to do with their time than to pretend that anything else is the case.