I must admit my thoughts on witch crafts have always been 'coloured' by reading Dennis Wheatley at a young age in the 60s. Black magic, horned gods, pentagrams and sacrificial young maidens 'deflowered' ;) and so I had to readjust my thinking to Wicca, and consult the dictionary as to what it meant. So Gardner took an old word and rendered it into his version of witchcraft, and no doubt with a certain wicked cackle, did you not notice the antlered crown on the table in Spain, the Great God Pan has appeared, rampaging around in his usual fertile manner ;) and the phallic knives used for drawing the patterns on the ground, scepticism reared its ugly head but then he could have been genuine. In fact this was a history of an eccentric man, and Ronald Hutton did an excellent historic profile and I have never read anything on Wiccan so who am I to judge? But the word 'paganism' is the one I prefer and relate to in a modern way and perhaps the love of nature and the need to protect our environment, the healing process lies at the bottom of this 'new age' thinking...

"Thanks to Wheatley, people “knew” what Black Magic and Satanism – historic­ally an almost non-existent phen­omenon – were like. Professor Jean La Fontaine made an astute link to Wheatley-derived imagery in her debunking of the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic, and Ronald Hutton, in The Triumph of the Moon, remembers adolescents borrowing “risqué imagery” from Wheatley’s books to decorate parties: “For my generation of Essex teenagers, they represented the essential primer in diabolism.”.

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/2623/the_devil_rides_out.html