Etymology of Wicca Weekly Scotsman", in response to the popularisation of Margaret Murray's witch-cult hypothesis in Scotland, that "the Saxon word 'wicca', a witch" was "of immemorial usage" in the Scottish Lowlands. Doyle White suggests that the early Wiccans adopted the term "wicca" as the basis for the name of their burgeoning faith because theirs was a new religious movement that took "iconography and inspiration" from the polytheistic cults of pre-Christian Britain. Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), the man largely responsible for propagating the Wiccan religion in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s and the founder of the Gardnerian tradition, never used the term "Wicca"
Church and School of Wicca wife Yvonne was an American with a background in Spiritualism. He then claimed to have been initiated into a Wiccan group in St. Louis, Missouri. When living in St. Louis they developed a correspondence course through which to teach others about Wicca, advertising these courses as the "School of Wicca". They argued that by spreading their religious teaching in the form of a correspondence course, they were reaching a wider range of people than initiatory-based forms of Wicca, and that this would be necessary in order for the religion to become a "strong religious force". They believed strongly that Wicca