Nordic Folk Magic vs. Wicca: What's the Difference?

Picture two women, three hundred years and a sea apart.

The first stands in a circle she has cast herself, in a cottage garden in Hertfordshire in the 1950s. She calls the four quarters, east, south, west and north. She names the Goddess and the God. She works under a simple rule: if it harms none, do what you will.

The second stands in the doorway of a farmhouse in Jutland in the 1640s. She would never call herself a witch. That word could get her burned. On Sunday she sits in church with everyone else. But tonight she has pushed a piece of steel into the threshold to keep out what walks at night, and she has murmured a few words over a neighbour's feverish child, words she learned from an old woman, with Jesus and the saints in them. She names no goddess. She casts no circle. She is not worshipping anything. She is doing what works.

Both are called witchcraft today. They are not the same thing, and they were never meant to be.

I am often asked whether what I do is a kind of Wicca. It is not. So let me set out, as clearly as I can, what Wicca is, what Nordic folk magic is, and why the difference matters more than it first appears.

What is Wicca?

Wicca is a modern religion. It was brought into public view in England by Gerald Gardner, a retired British colonial civil servant, who said he had been initiated in 1939 by a secret coven in the New Forest. England's old Witchcraft Act was repealed in 1951, and in 1954 Gardner published Witchcraft Today. Doreen Valiente, whom he initiated at midsummer 1953 and who soon became the High Priestess of his coven, rewrote much of the ritual into the poetry Wiccans still speak. When she pressed him on its origins, Gardner admitted that what he had received from the New Forest was fragmentary, and that he had filled the gaps from other sources.

Those sources show. Wicca draws on ceremonial magic, on Freemasonry, on Aleister Crowley, and on Margaret Murray, an Egyptologist whose 1921 book argued that the victims of the witch trials had belonged to a surviving pagan fertility religion. Historians have long since taken that theory apart. Wicca kept the shape of it.

What Gardner and Valiente built has its own beauty: a Goddess and a God, initiation into covens, a circle cast and the four quarters called, a Book of Shadows copied by hand by each initiate, and an eightfold calendar of festivals, the Wheel of the Year. The wheel is a modern assembly too. Gardner's coven added the solstices and equinoxes to its year in 1958, and three of the names now familiar everywhere, Ostara, Litha and Mabon, were coined by the American Wiccan Aidan Kelly in 1974. No people of the past is known to have kept all eight as a set.

I say this without contempt. Wicca is a sincere religion, and it has opened a door to the craft for a great many people. But it is young, it is English, and its roots lie in the occult revival of the early twentieth century.

What is Nordic folk magic?

Nordic folk magic has no founder, no date of birth and no creed. It is not a religion at all. It is a body of practice, layered over thousands of years, the way soil is layered in a bog. To understand it you have to dig.

The deepest layer: stone, bog and offering

At the bottom lies something far older than any saga. For thousands of years before anyone in the North wrote a word, people were giving things to the wet places. Stone Age farmers laid flint axes and pots of food in the bogs. Bronze Age people gave them their great curved lurs, and at Trundholm the sun chariot. In the Iron Age, weapons were bent and burned before they were sunk, and sometimes a human being went into the bog as well. Nobody recorded the words that went with those gifts. But their logic, give something of worth, give it where the world is thin, and let it go, runs straight through everything that came after.

Sometimes the oldest layer was even picked up again by hand. Danish farmers in the 1800s turned up polished flint axes in their fields, five thousand years old or more, and called them thunderstones, believing they fell from the sky with the lightning. They kept them under the roof by the chimney, walled them into new buildings, laid them in their beds, and hung them over the horses so that the mara would not dare to touch them. A tool from the Stone Age became a charm of the nineteenth century without ever leaving the parish.

The saga layer: seeresses and chanted charms

Much later come the practices of the Viking Age, seen through the sagas written down a few centuries later. There is galdr, magic that is sung or chanted, and seiðr, the trance-craft of seeing and influencing. There is the völva, the seeress who travelled from farm to farm.

The Saga of Erik the Red describes one of them, Thorbjörg, called the little völva, arriving at a Greenland farm in a year of famine. She wore a blue cloak set with stones, a hood of black lambskin lined with white catskin, catskin gloves and calfskin boots, and she carried a staff with a brass knob. The household cooked her a porridge of goat's milk and the hearts of every kind of animal on the farm. The next day she sat on a raised seat and told them the hard times would soon end. Scholars still argue over how much of the saga is literature, but details like the staff, the high seat and the singing appear to come from real practice.

The middle layer: black books and cunning folk

Above that lie the long Christian centuries, when magic did not disappear. It went to church. The kloge folk, the cunning women and men of Denmark, healed with charms that called on Jesus and the saints. Their knowledge was copied by hand into black books, the sortebøger, often under the name of Cyprianus.

Here is the most beautiful proof I know that the old layer never died. More than a thousand years ago, a cleric in Germany wrote down a charm in which Wodan and another god ride into the forest, Balder's foal sprains its foot, and Wodan heals it with words: bone to bone, blood to blood. A Danish charm recorded in Viborg in 1618 begins with Our Lord riding up the hill, where his foal sprained its foot. The rider has changed his name. The horse, the hill and the healing are the same.

And the trail does not stop at the borders of the North. Charms of the same kind have been found in Gaelic, Latvian and Finnish. In India, a hymn of the Atharvaveda, composed perhaps three thousand years ago, mends a broken bone with the same pattern: let marrow be joined to marrow, limb to limb, skin to skin. Many scholars believe this way of healing with words is older than any of the peoples who later used it.

The living layer: custom

And on top lies what nobody ever called magic at all, because everyone did it. Porridge for the nisse on Christmas Eve. Steel pushed into the threshold to keep out the hidden folk and the restless. A window opened at a death, mirrors covered, the coffin carried out by a door that would then be closed for good. This is folk magic too, perhaps the purest kind. It survived because nobody thought to forbid it.

This is how I read all of it. The North is my ground, and the Old Nordic traditions are what I stand on. But the logic underneath them is rarely only Nordic. The fear that a reflection can hold a soul turns up in Jutland, in ancient Greece and in China. Iron against what walks at night, a gift that must be repaid, the dead who must be shown the way out: they surface again and again across cultures and across thousands of years, because they answer something deeply human. When I find the same working in a Danish black book and a hymn from India, I take it as a sign that I have reached bedrock.

The real differences

A religion, and a craft

Wicca is a religion, with gods to honour and festivals to keep. Nordic folk magic never asked anyone to join anything. The cunning woman of Jutland was baptised, married in church and buried in the churchyard, and she saw no contradiction in charming a wound on Saturday and singing hymns on Sunday. Folk magic was not a faith that competed with Christianity. It was a set of tools that lived alongside whatever faith the user held. That is why it could survive the Reformation, the witch trials and two centuries of priests telling people to stop.

Gods

Wicca has its Goddess and God, often understood as the two faces of the divine. Nordic folk magic has no fixed pantheon. It calls on whoever has power over the matter at hand. In the saga layer that might be Odin, and further down lie powers whose names nobody ever wrote down. In the black books it is Jesus, the Virgin, Saint Peter, or Saint Olav in Norwegian horse charms. And all the way through, it deals with beings no church ever named: the nisse in the barn, the hidden folk under the hill, the vætter of the land, the dead who have not settled. These are not worshipped. They are dealt with, the way you deal with powerful neighbours.

Morality: harm none, or the law of exchange

Wicca's ethic is the Rede, if it harms none, do what you will, often paired with the threefold law, the belief that what you send out returns to you three times over. The threefold law is itself a modern idea. Doreen Valiente, who did more than anyone to shape Wicca's ritual, said in an interview that she did not believe in it.

The old Nordic craft worked by a different rule. Nothing is free. What you take, you pay for. What you give opens the way for what returns. The same cunning woman who could charm away a fever was believed to know how to send one, and her neighbours never pretended otherwise. They judged her by whether her magic helped or harmed, not by whether it was pure. That ethic is older than the Rede, and more honest about what power is.

The circle, and the threshold

The Wiccan circle is cast to make a sacred space apart from the world, guarded at the four quarters by the elements of ceremonial magic. Nordic folk magic does not step out of the world. It works on the places where the world is already thin: the doorstep, the boundary stone, the crossroads, the bog, the churchyard wall, the place under the bed. Folk magic finds sacred space rather than making it, and it knows where not to go.

The year

The Wheel of the Year turns on eight evenly spaced festivals. The old Nordic year turned on the farm and the church calendar, and it was anything but even. The Twelve Nights of Christmas, when the dead and the hidden folk were abroad. Valborg's night at the end of April. Midsummer, Sankt Hans, when the herbs were strongest and Danish witches were said to ride north to their feasts. Each had its own rules, its own dangers and its own workings, and none of them was balanced against another.

And under the church calendar lies a much older year. The midwinter feast of jól was kept in the North before Christianity came, and the sagas say that King Håkon the Good had it moved to fall together with the Christian Christmas. Older still is the watching of the sun itself. In Ireland, at Newgrange, a passage tomb built more than five thousand years ago, before the pyramids of Egypt, was laid so that the sunrise on the shortest days of the year reaches all the way into the chamber of the dead.

Tools

Wicca has its athame, its chalice, its pentacle and its wand. Nordic folk magic used what was in the house: steel, salt, bread, milk, a needle, red thread, hair, a coin, a key, a shovel of earth from a grave. It needed no special equipment because the ordinary world was the equipment.

How it was passed on

Wicca is passed through initiation, from coven to coven, and many traditions trace a line back to Gardner himself. Nordic folk magic was passed the way recipes are. A charm learned from an old woman in the next village. A black book copied from a neighbour's, mistakes and all. A habit picked up by a child who watched her grandmother put salt somewhere and never asked why. Nobody was initiated. People simply came to know.

You may wonder whether any of this matters, if both paths lead somewhere good. I think it matters for one reason above all: the two are built on different logic, and the logic is where the power lives.

A great deal of what is sold today as Norse or Nordic witchcraft is Wicca wearing a Viking costume. A circle is cast, the quarters are called, and runes are painted on the candles. There is nothing wrong with a Wiccan using runes. But it is not the old craft, and calling it ancient does a disservice to both traditions. Wicca deserves to be understood as the modern religion it is. The Nordic craft deserves to be understood on its own terms.

Those terms are stranger and harder than most modern practice. The old craft does not ask what you intend. It asks where you are standing, what you have given, what lives in the place, and what you have disturbed. It assumes the world is not neutral and not empty. It assumes that a doorstep is not the same as a floor, that milk poured at a tree root is a conversation, and that the dead and the hidden folk have opinions. Learn to think that way and the spells begin to make sense. Without it, they are only recipes.

Can you practise both?

Yes, and many people do. Nobody owns the moon, and the cunning folk of Denmark took whatever worked from wherever they found it. My only advice is to know which one you are doing at any given moment, and why. Mixing is a craft of its own. Confusing the two is how people end up with rituals that look impressive and do very little.

As for me, I am not Wiccan, and I have never been. My work stands on Old Nordic ground: the black books, the trial records, the sagas, the customs of farm and field, the archaeology beneath them all, my own family tradition and our grimoire. And more… But it does not stop at the Viking Age, and it does not stop at the edge of the North. It reaches back through thousands of years, to the flint in the bog and the first gifts given to water, and it keeps watch for the same logic wherever it surfaces, across cultures and across time. The North is where I stand. It has never been the edge of what I look at.

Where to begin

If what you have read here feels less like information and more like recognition, pay attention to that.

I would start where the old ways themselves started: not with a spell, but with the laws beneath it. That is what Day 1 of my Witch's Journey is for. It is called The First Five Laws of the Forgotten Craft, and it does not hand you a ritual to perform. It shows you why the old rituals ever worked: why place mattered, why something always had to be given, and why a doorstep was never just a doorstep. You will find it on my site.

The old women of the North never needed a circle. They needed to know where they stood.

~Hazel