A Witches’ Bible
Modern witchcraft , in Europe and America, is a fact . It is no longer an underground relic of which the scale, and even the existence , is hotly disputed by anthropologists. It is no longer the bizarre hobby of a handful of cranks. It is the active religious practice of a substantial number of people. Just how large a number is not certain , because Wicca, beyond the individual coven , is not a hierarchically organized religion. Where formal organizations do exist, as in the United States, this is for legal and tax reasons, not for dogmatic uniformity or the numbering of members . But the numbers are, for example, enough to support a variety of lively periodicals and to justify the publication of an ever-growing body of literature, on both sides of the Atlantic ; so a reasonable estimate would be that the active adherents of Wicca now number tens of thousands, at the very I I