Three words

Wicca, witchcraft, and Paganism

They overlap in modern speech and they are not synonyms. Use them as if a historian were in the room, because one might be.

Pagan, in contemporary English, usually means a family of modern religions that are not exclusively Abrahamic and that often look toward pre-Christian gods or toward nature. It is an umbrella, not a church. The people under it disagree on purpose.

Witchcraft is a practice of magic, folk or ceremonial or personal. In many centuries and countries, “witch” was an accusation, not an identity, and people died of it. Claiming the word now is a modern choice with that shadow behind it. Witchcraft can be religious or not. It can be Wiccan or emphatically not.

Wicca is a set of modern religious witchcraft traditions, emerging into public view in the mid-twentieth century through Gerald Gardner and others, later branching into initiatory lines and eclectic, self-taught forms. The eightfold wheel, the Goddess and God pairing, and the circle as commonly taught are strongly associated with this movement. Historians argue about Gardner’s sources. What is not seriously arguable is that Wicca, as a named religion, is modern.

Sources and further reading