Etymology of Wicca Stewart Farrar, describes "Wicca" as "the witches' name for their Craft" in his book "What Witches Do" (1971). The widespread adoption of "Wicca" in reference to Pagan Witchcraft would have brought benefits to its practitioners, who were widely maligned and faced persecution for their practice of "witchcraft"; an emotive term often associated with Satanism that had negative connotations in the Western imagination. Doyle White argued that the practitioners' presentation of themselves as Wiccans rather than witches removed some of the social stigma that they faced. From 1970 onward, increasing numbers of books teaching readers how to become Pagan Witches were
Church and School of Wicca Seminar", in which workshops, rituals, and lectures took place, primarily for students of their correspondence course. In 1996 they relocated to Hinton, West Virginia. In 1985 the Church of Wicca were involved in the "Dettmer v. Landon" case, during which the District Court of Virginia ruled that Wicca constituted a legitimate religion under U.S. law. The Virginia prison authorities appealed the case, and in 1986 Judge J. Butzner of the Federal Appeals Court upheld the original decision. This made the Church of Wicca the only federally recognised Wiccan church to have its status as a religion upheld in a federal