Volume 31 Belief System 1951 onward

The Unaffiliated

The machinethe paperback that replaced the coven

Attested from: 1951
Narrates: 1951 onward

The argument in one sentence

The series ends on the two things belief becomes when membership stops being the default — a religion founded in 1954 whose construction is fully on the record, assembled from published books, sold as published books, and transmitted with no gatekeeper at all; and a category, around 1.9 billion people on Pew’s 2025 count, that builds no institution, keeps no register and is visible only when a survey asks — and it says on its first page that these are not the same kind of thing, says why they belong in one book anyway, and keeps them distinguishable to the last chapter.

Wicca could only go public because Parliament repealed the Witchcraft Act of 1735 in 1951. Its legality is younger than the transistor. And the volume’s real subject is larger: the unaffiliated are now the world’s third-largest category and its fastest-growing.The commissioning line

What it is

Wicca could only go public because Parliament repealed the Witchcraft Act of 1735 in 1951. Its legality is younger than the transistor. The unaffiliated are now the world’s third-largest category and its fastest-growing.

This is a history of two objects that became visible when membership stopped being automatic, and of how we know.

Wicca is not what the nones believe. The nones are not Wicca without the rituals. Most nones are not Pagans. Pew’s 1.9 billion and the Craft’s order of magnitude are two measurements of two objects.

Five movements: the world of the last witchcraft act, the machine of the paperback, the canon designed to vary, the money, and the split that leaves no record.

The book never adjudicates. Survey questions are named as instruments.

Belief System, Volume 31.

In full

The Unaffiliated is the series closer, and it has to keep two lanes from collapsing. One lane is a retired folklorist, a museum, a paperback and a 1951 statute written for Spiritualists. The other is a leftover checkbox that became, on Pew’s count, 1.9 billion people.

Gardner, Murray, Valiente, Graves and Hutton remain in copyright. Their sentences are not used as decoration. What is quoted at length is what the licence allows: the Witchcraft Act, the Fraudulent Mediums Act, Leland’s Aradia, Crowley’s Gnostic Mass as printed in 1919 and 1929, Kipling’s “A Tree Song,” and the wordings of survey questions.

Llewellyn, conventionally dated 1901, put a religion on a shelf. Voas and Crockett wrote that absence of religion was almost always passed on. Ásatrúarfélagið and Covenant of the Goddess are conventionally dated foundings with public filings. No Pagan-economy total is invented.

The volume uses five fixed phrases, and no sixth. It reports no circle as fact and denies none. It never tells you what anybody believed when they ticked no religion.

Belief System is a history of world religion, one tradition at a time. Thirty-one volumes, ordered by earliest secure attestation.

The geography

Places in The Unaffiliated

Explore selected places in this book. Press play for a narrated tour, or choose a marker or a place in the list to read its context.

Listen and explore · 0:48

A three-stop audio guide

AI-generated voice · OpenAI Marin

1. LondonCity area
2. Bricket WoodCity area
3. Isle of ManApproximate area

The Isle of Man appears in the chapter called The Man from the Museum. The island is shown as an approximate area. The book examines a particular strand of modern religious history without making it stand for everyone who is unaffiliated.

Read the full transcript

1. Isle of Man

2. London

London brings us to the materials lying about: the sources and objects available to people assembling new accounts and practices. The chapter asks how those materials were used. A city marker locates the setting without proving a claimed ancient continuity.

3. Bricket Wood

Bricket Wood is a more specific stop, linked to the chapter set in nineteen fifty-seven. The distinction between a documented setting and a wider category matters. Unaffiliated people and the particular traditions discussed here are not treated as the same group.

Related chapter: Bricket Wood, 1957

London

City-area locator, not a building or exact event location.

From the manuscript · chapter 4

… is his; the objects are checkable. A determined reader in 1950 did not need an initiator. The reader needed a London address, a few pounds, and time. Israel Regardie's The Golden Dawn volumes (1937–40) put a late-Victorian magical order's rituals into the bookshops. The Golden Dawn itself had already broken up; the rituals had not. They were now a set of four bound books: officers, pentagrams, elemental quarters, a graded …

Chapter 4: The Materials Lying About

Location: GeoNames · London. 51.51°N, 0.13°W.

Bricket Wood

City-area locator, not a building or exact event location.

From the manuscript · chapter 22

The first split came three years after the first book. Gardner's coven at Bricket Wood divided in 1957 when Doreen Valiente's faction, alarmed at his publicity-seeking, proposed written rules. Gardner answered with a body of "ancient" Craft Laws that the textual record dates to precisely this quarrel. A founding schism over publicity, in a religion whose machine was publicity. The series' pattern holds one last time: first splits are about …

Chapter 22: Bricket Wood, 1957

Location: GeoNames · Bricket Wood. 51.71°N, 0.37°W.

Isle of Man

Broad geographic extent from the gazetteer. The shaded area is an approximate locator, not a political or religious boundary.

From the manuscript · chapter 2

… 1735 still stood. Witchcraft Today appeared in 1954 under his own name, from the witchcraft museum at Castletown on the Isle of Man, after the Fraudulent Mediums Act had repealed it. Both books are in copyright. Their arguments are cited here in this book's words; they are not reproduced. The first is a novel in which a coven and a ritual system are shown as historical survival. The second is …

Chapter 2: The Man from the Museum

Location: Pleiades · 89242. 54.20°N, 4.56°W.

Modern coastline: Natural Earth (public domain). Place data: GeoNames (CC BY 4.0), Pleiades contributors (CC BY 3.0), and the sources linked for each place. Gazetteer coordinates have been selected and adapted for these reading maps. Rectangles show approximate location extents, not religious territory or historical borders. This is a selected reading guide, not a complete place-name index.

The contents

26 chapters in five movements. Every volume in the series has the same five, in the same order, and each chapter below is printed with the idea it carries.

Movement OneThe World

Two openings running in parallel — a statute and a survey category. The evidence for this volume’s founding events is the best in the series; the one place it thins, the New Forest, is where the confidence falls with it, in the same sentence.

1The Last Witchcraft ActIn 1944 a Scottish medium was tried at the Old Bailey and imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act 1735, and in 1951 Parliament repealed that Act with the Fraudulent Mediums Act — a campaign fought and won by Spiritualists, not witches — so the legal door Wicca walked through was opened for somebody else, and the religion this volume describes is younger, in law, than the transistor.
2The Man from the MuseumGerald Gardner — rubber planter and customs officer in Malaya, retired 1936, folklorist, naturist — published witchcraft first as pseudonymous fiction while the 1735 Act still stood (High Magic’s Aid, 1949, as “Scire”), then under his own name once it did not (Witchcraft Today, 1954, from the witchcraft museum at Castletown on the Isle of Man); the tradition holds that he was initiated into a surviving coven in the New Forest in September 1939, and that claim is the one place in this volume where the tradition’s account and the record part company.
3The Thesis That Was Already DeadWicca’s founding charter was a published academic theory — Margaret Murray’s claim that the early-modern witch trials recorded a surviving pre-Christian fertility religion — which specialist reviewers had been dismantling since 1922; Murray nonetheless wrote the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on witchcraft that stood for decades, was president of the Folklore Society in the 1950s, and wrote the foreword to Witchcraft Today — so the new religion was built on a thesis that was simultaneously discredited among specialists and orthodox on the reference shelf.
4The Materials Lying AboutMid-century Britain held a fully stocked warehouse of published ritual, myth and nostalgia — the Golden Dawn’s rituals in print since Regardie (1937–40), Crowley’s corpus (Gardner met him in 1947, months before his death, and held an O.T.O. charter from him), Leland’s Aradia (1899), Frazer’s Golden Bough, Graves’s The White Goddess (1948), the folk-revival and woodcraft movements — which means a religion could be assembled entirely from things a determined reader could buy, and the shelf it was assembled from survives for inspection.
5A Category Gets a NameThe unaffiliated become visible only when someone builds an instrument — Gallup began logging a few per cent of Americans with no religious preference in the late 1940s, the US government asked religion in a household survey exactly once (March 1957: 2.7 per cent reported none) and never again, and sociology did not even have a word for the group until Glenn Vernon’s 1968 paper proposed “the religious 'nones': a neglected category” — so the largest religious change of the modern period enters history as a residual checkbox.
6Two Things, One ConditionA new religion of self-selected joiners and a swelling category of unannounced leavers are not the same kind of thing — but both are downstream of the same event, the collapse of default membership, which scholars date and fight over: Brown puts the British rupture in the 1960s, Davie proposed “believing without belonging”, Voas and Crockett answered that the belief goes too, a generation behind — and the volume takes no side, states its method, and runs the two stories in labelled lanes from here on.

Movement TwoThe Machine

The transmission technology, named as a concrete object or institution — not an abstraction. Here it is two machines: the paperback and then the web for the religion; and for the category, a machine running in reverse — the institutions that stopped transmitting.

7A Religion at RetailOccult publishing made a religion available without a teacher: Llewellyn — a horoscope house founded in 1901, bought in 1961 by Carl Weschcke — published Lady Sheba’s Book of Shadows (1971), a mass-market printing of supposedly initiatory material, then Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft (1986) and Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner (1988), and the shelf did what a coven used to do — no earlier tradition in this series permitted entry by purchase alone.
8The Paperback Undoes the CovenGardner’s own rule was that only a witch can make a witch — and the trade list dissolved it: initiates themselves published the rituals (the Farrars, with Valiente’s help, in 1981 and 1984), Cunningham made self-initiation explicit and respectable in 1988, and by the 1990s the largest survey of American Pagans found solitaries outnumbering coven members — the paperback dissolved the initiatory lineage it described, inside one generation.
9Usenet, Then the WebThe internet did retail’s job again, faster and for free: the Usenet groups of the early 1990s, then the web — The Witches’ Voice from 1997 networked tens of thousands of self-identified practitioners with no organisation behind it, a 1996 film and a Llewellyn teen imprint made adolescent self-discovery a documented recruitment path, and by the 2000s there were traditions with no in-person component at all, including an online school claiming six-figure enrolment — a claim the volume prints as a claim, because self-report is not a measurement.
10The Machine That StoppedFor the unaffiliated the machine is a negative one — not what transmits belief but what stopped transmitting it: the institutions that made membership automatic (established churches, Sunday schools, church schooling, membership-by-birth rules) shut down or lost their defaults one by one, and the failure is measurable where transmission is measured — British panel data shows religious parents now pass affiliation to their children at rates no institution could survive, and Sunday school enrolment fell from roughly half of British children around 1900 to a few per cent by century’s end.
11No GatekeeperEvery machine in this series gatekept as it transmitted — the reciter guilds of the Buddhism volume, the scribal curriculum of the Mesopotamia volume, the isnad of the Sunni and Shia volume, the lineage certificate of the Zen volume — and this volume’s machines are the first that do not: retail and search transmit without licensing anyone, which removes error-correction along with authority, and the observed result on the religion’s side is unbounded variation, while on the category’s side the same fact runs in reverse — nothing gatekeeps the exit either.

Movement ThreeThe Canon

What is in, what is out, who decided, when, and what the decision cost. The real subject is who had the authority to close it — and this volume’s answer is: nobody, twice, and on the religion’s side deliberately. The movement opens with that argument, never with a text.

12A Canon Designed to VaryThe Book of Shadows is a canon built to drift: each initiate hand-copies the book from an initiator and may alter it, the tradition holds the copy should be personal and, in danger, destroyed — so where every other volume in this series asked who closed the canon, this tradition made closure structurally impossible on purpose, and the drift can be watched happening because the earliest strata survive in a named collection.
13What Gardner TookThe founding documents are traceable in real time — Kelly’s stratigraphy and Hutton’s history establish what Gardner took from Crowley’s Gnostic Mass, from the Golden Dawn’s published rituals, from Freemasonry’s forms, from Kipling, and above all from Leland’s Aradia, and because the sources are largely public domain the borrowing can be shown on the page: the source text quoted verbatim beside a description of what the ritual made of it — the first religion in this series whose construction is fully on the record, which is true of every religion at its founding and documented for this one.
14The Trade Paperback CanonWhat actually circulates as scripture is a commercial trade list — The Spiral Dance (1979), Buckland (1986), Cunningham (1988) — and the one attempt at a creed proves the rule: the Council of American Witches adopted thirteen Principles of Wiccan Belief in April 1974 and dissolved within the year, leaving a creed with no enforcement mechanism that survives chiefly because a US Army chaplains’ handbook reprinted it in 1978 — a canon whose most durable witness is a government manual.
15What the Nones Believe“No religion” is not “no belief”, and conflating the nones with atheists is the commonest error in writing on this subject: in Pew’s 2023–24 US measurement the unaffiliated are about 29 per cent of adults, of whom the self-described atheists are a small minority and “nothing in particular” the bulk, majorities of nones report belief in God or a higher power, and the largest single block inside the global 1.9 billion is China — where Pew’s own measurement shows the category is an artefact, since a tenth of adults identify with a religion while far larger shares hold religious beliefs and practise at gravesites.
16Counting Witches, Counting NothingThe instruments disagree because they measure different things, and the disagreement is the data: England and Wales’ census asks the leading “What is your religion?” and got 37.2 per cent “No religion” in 2021 while the British Social Attitudes survey asks about belonging and gets numbers around half again higher; the same census counted self-identified Pagans in the tens of thousands while US survey series had Wiccan identification multiplying forty-fold between 1990 and 2008 — and for Pagans every count is soft in a way the volume must explain rather than average: self-identification, no membership rolls, and a population with documented reasons not to answer, against which stand the registers that do exist — a US federal court treating Wicca as a religion in 1986, the VA adding the pentacle to its emblem list in 2007, a British charity regulator registering a Druid body in 2010.

Movement FourThe Money

Who paid, who was paid, and how we know. Numbers get their provenance in the same sentence. This is the series’ one money movement about money ceasing — and, on the other side of the yoke, the smallest commercial economy in the series.

17SubtractionEvery money movement in this series asked who owned this; the last one watches ownership dissolve — measured in the owners’ own published ledgers: national church attendance series falling for decades, US congregational membership below half the population for the first time in Gallup’s polling in 2020, and religion’s share of charitable giving shrinking — the volume’s discipline is that every one of these is a series published by the institution or pollster itself, with its method attached, and none is a lament.
18What Happens to an Empty ChurchSubtraction has a real-estate department: the Church of England has closed on the order of two thousand churches since 1969 under a published procedure that decides each building’s afterlife, Dutch and Quebec programmes plan for closure at diocesan scale, and famous conversions — a Dominican church in Maastricht that became a bookshop, a Pittsburgh church that became a brewery — sit beside the harder fact that the money does not vanish with the members: the Church Commissioners’ endowment stands in the billions of pounds while attendance halves, because assets outlive congregations.
19The Tax You Can LeaveGermany prices membership visibly — church tax at eight or nine per cent of income-tax liability, collected by the state, escapable only by a formal registry-office exit that costs a fee — which makes it the cleanest natural experiment in this volume: the churches publish their own exit counts annually (a record over half a million Catholic exits in 2022), a 2015 change that put church tax on capital gains produced a documented spike in exits the year the banks’ notification letters landed, and church-tax revenue kept rising even as members left, because rates ride on wages — the one place in the series where leaving a religion generates a paper trail, and the paper is fiscal.
20Paid by the HeadIceland routes a per-head congregation fee, the sóknargjald, from the state to whatever registered body a citizen lists — which makes the register itself worth money, and produced two experiments no other country ran: Ásatrúarfélagið, the modern heathen fellowship recognised in 1973 with 58 members, grew to roughly 6,250 by 2025 with the fee funding a long-building temple; and in late 2015 activists took over a dormant registered body called Zuism, promised to refund members their fee, and thousands registered within weeks — the sharpest documented demonstration in this series that when the state pays per head, the head-count is what gets gamed.
21The Small Economy of the CraftOn the other side of the yoke sits the smallest commercial economy in this series — a publisher, festivals, and supply retail: Llewellyn’s list, Pagan festival gatherings running since 1980, a convention that filled a San Jose hotel for a quarter-century, and the witch shop and its online successors — with no tithe, no treasury, no endowment and no ledger, which the series has seen once before, in the fee-for-service economy of the Ifá volume; the checkable fragments are the public charity filings of the umbrella bodies, and the volume prints those fragments rather than inventing a total.

Movement FiveThe Split

What divided it, what it became, what it handed on. This is the last volume: there is no next tradition to hand to, and the movement says so — the final hand-off is to the present, and the last two chapters carry the series’ closing obligation.

22Bricket Wood, 1957The first split came three years after the first book: Gardner’s own coven at Bricket Wood divided in 1957 when Doreen Valiente’s faction, alarmed at his publicity-seeking, proposed written rules and Gardner answered with a body of “ancient” Craft Laws that the textual record dates to precisely this quarrel — a founding schism over publicity in a religion whose machine was publicity, and the series’ pattern holding one last time: first splits are about governance, as the Second Council of the Buddhism volume was about gold and silver.
23Endless SubdivisionWith no authority to appeal to, subdivision never stops: Alex Sanders built the rival Alexandrian line out of tabloid fame in 1960s London, the Bucklands carried Gardnerian Wicca to America in 1964 and the eclectic explosion followed, Z Budapest founded women-only Dianic witchcraft in Los Angeles in 1971, Starhawk’s Reclaiming fused the Craft with feminist politics in San Francisco from 1979 — and where the Sunni and Shia volume’s split ran through courts and armies, these run through publishing contracts and conference programmes, because there is nothing else for a schism to capture.
24The ReconstructionistsThe reconstructionist traditions rejected Wicca’s eclecticism for source-based revival — Ásatrú founded in Iceland and America in the early 1970s, with Hellenic, Kemetic and Slavic parallels — and the volume draws its boundary here in the open: the historical religions belong to the Pagan Europe volume, reconstruction is a modern movement built from scholarship, and the serious reconstructionists say so themselves; inside Heathenry the split is live and political — a folkish wing holding ancestry-based positions and an inclusive wing organised against it, with a 2016 declaration named for a stanza of the Hávamál signed by scores of organisations disavowing the folkish flagship — and the volume reports these as documented positions of named organisations, which is all a book that never adjudicates can do and everything it needs to do.
25The Split That Leaves No RecordThe unaffiliated’s split is the one this series has never had to write: leaving without joining produces no Marcion, no Bricket Wood, no declaration, no archive — so the volume does with survey panels what other volumes did with council minutes: the switching tables show disaffiliation running heavily one way in the West, the category itself retains its raised children at rising rates — the one place the nones do have a transmission machine, because the default itself has flipped — and the category’s apparent unity is an artefact of the instrument, which by now the reader can say in the volume’s own words.
26The Last Hand-OffEvery tradition in this series survived because it built something that could carry it to people who had not met its founder — reciter guilds, scribal schools, the isnad, the lineage certificate, the parish register, the printing house, the record — and the series ends by putting its own question to the present: transmission is now free, universal and instantaneous, and the thing being transmitted is, for a fifth of the world, no longer membership in anything; Wicca is the limit case on one side, a religion born inside the machine age whose whole construction is on the record and which no one controls, and the unaffiliated are the limit case on the other, the largest religious change of the period by headcount, carried by no machine at all and visible only when a survey asks — the series does not answer the question, because it is a map and not an argument, but it is entitled to end on it, and the hand-off, for the first time in thirty-one volumes, is to the reader.

What this volume cannot establish

Printed in the book before the argument is, and printed here for the same reason. A history of a tradition that will not say where its evidence runs out is not a history.

Whether any witch religion existed in the New Forest before Gardner described one. This is the volume’s signature limit and it is stated inside Movement One, not saved for a coda. The record shows that Dorothy Clutterbuck existed — Valiente’s document search in the 1980s and Heselton’s archival work found the registers and the will — and that her surviving notebooks record a conventional churchgoing life; whether she, or anyone, initiated Gardner in 1939 cannot be established. Heselton’s circumstantial case for a pre-existing esoteric milieu in Highcliffe and Hutton’s caution are both named, and neither is adjudicated. The series has spent thirty volumes on the gap between a tradition’s account of its origin and the earliest evidence for it; in its youngest tradition the gap is fifteen years wide, and it is still a gap.
What any individual “none” believes. Surveys measure categories, and the category “nothing in particular” is a checkbox, not a creed. Aggregate belief data exists and is printed with its question wordings; the interior of any one respondent is not reachable from it, and the volume does not pretend otherwise.
How many modern Pagans there are, beyond an order of magnitude. Self-identification with no membership rolls, instruments that disagree with each other by design, and a population with documented reasons not to answer a survey. The volume prints the census and survey figures with their instruments attached and refuses a single number.
Why anyone leaves a religion. Panel data records correlates — age, cohort, parental affiliation. Motive is an interior state, and this series does not invent interior states, for anybody, including the 1.9 billion.
The contents of oath-bound initiatory material beyond what initiates have themselves published. Initiatory Wicca designates its ritual corpus oath-bound. Much of it was published by initiates — Valiente and the Farrars, on their own decision — and what they published, the volume uses. What remains designated restricted, the volume declines, and says so in the text, per the series’ designation-not-origin rule. An explained absence is a finding.
Whether the growth continues. “Fastest-growing” is a measured statement about 2010–2020, not a projection. The volume ends on the question, not on a forecast.
Any total for the Pagan economy. Fee-for-service, retail and festivals, with no central treasury and no ledger — the Ifá volume’s problem again, in a fully literate society. The checkable fragments (public charity filings, publishers’ claims labelled as claims) are printed as fragments.

Sources

69 works, dated, and specific enough that a reader can go and look at the thing. Nothing is on this list that the desk did not consult.

The bibliography, as the volume prints it
#	Document or work	Date	Evidence for
1	Witchcraft Act 1735, 9 Geo. 2 c. 5	1735	pretence of witchcraft as an offence; witchcraft as such no longer prosecutable
2	Malcolm Gaskill, Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches	2001	Helen Duncan’s 1944 Old Bailey conviction, nine months
3	Jane Rebecca Yorke conviction, Central Criminal Court	26 September 1944	the Act’s last conviction
4	Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951, 14 & 15 Geo. 6 c. 33	1951	intent, device, and payment required; Spiritualist repeal
5	Hansard, House of Lords, second reading of the Fraudulent Mediums Bill	3 May 1951	Hailsham: the 1735 Act “bad, antiquated and tyrannous”
6	Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon	1999; 2nd ed. 2019	repeal as Wicca’s precondition; the mid-century warehouse; mutation
7	J. L. Bracelin, Gerald Gardner: Witch	1960	authorised life; Idries Shah’s ghost-writing noted
8	Gerald Gardner, High Magic’s Aid, as Scire	1949	witchcraft as fiction while the 1735 Act still stood
9	Gerald Gardner, Witchcraft Today	1954	first signed non-fiction claim; still in print
10	Janet and Stewart Farrar, The Witches’ Way	1984	Valiente’s appendix: Clutterbuck’s birth, death and probate
11	Philip Heselton, Wiccan Roots	2000	Highcliffe milieu; notebooks of a conventional Anglican life
12	Philip Heselton, Witchfather	2012	the same archival case; the 1957 narrative frame
13	Margaret Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe	1921	the founding thesis; trial records read as minutes
14	Margaret Murray, The God of the Witches	1931	“the Old Religion” popularised
15	Jacqueline Simpson, “Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?,” Folklore 105	1994	Britannica run 1929–69; Folklore Society presidency 1953–55
16	George Lincoln Burr, review of Murray	1922	specialist demolition from the first year
17	Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic	1971	trials as accusation and stereotype, not a surviving church
18	Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons	1975	the clandestine-sect myth built from inquisitorial narrative
19	Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn	1937–40	late-Victorian rituals in four bound volumes
20	Aleister Crowley, Gnostic Mass, The Equinox III(1) and Magick	1919; 1929	“Do what thou wilt”; public-domain source text
21	Charles Godfrey Leland, Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches	1899	monthly assembly and naked rites; source of the Charge
22	Rudyard Kipling, “A Tree Song,” Puck of Pook’s Hill	1906	greenwood liturgy later drawn into ritual
23	U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P-20, No. 79	February 1958	March 1957 CPS: 2.7 per cent “no religion”
24	Gallup religious-preference question	from 1948	a few per cent volunteered none on a short Protestant/Catholic/Jewish list
25	Glenn M. Vernon, “The Religious 'Nones': A Neglected Category,” JSSR 7(2)	1968	the residual gets a name, pages 219–229
26	General Social Survey religion item	from 1972	“no religion” offered from the start; about 5 per cent at the opening
27	Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain	2001	a 1960s rupture in transmission, reported as his
28	Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging	1994	belief more durable than belonging, reported as hers
29	David Voas and Alasdair Crockett, “Religion in Britain: Neither Believing nor Belonging,” Sociology 39(1)	2005	the belief goes too; about half of parental religiosity transmitted
30	Chas S. Clifton, Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America	2006	American print culture; Lady Sheba 1971; Buckland 1986; the 1974 Council
31	Scott Cunningham, Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner	1988	self-initiation made explicit
32	Janet and Stewart Farrar, Eight Sabbats for Witches	1981	initiates publishing the calendar on their own decision
33	Doreen Valiente, The Rebirth of Witchcraft	1989	cooperating on the Farrars; recognising Crowley in the Charge; 1957
34	Helen A. Berger, Evan A. Leach and Leigh S. Shaffer, Voices from the Pagan Census	2003	solitary share 50.9 per cent in a self-selected survey
35	Douglas E. Cowan, Cyberhenge: Modern Pagans on the Internet	2005	Usenet, FAQs, short-lifespan authority claims
36	Helen A. Berger and Douglas Ezzy, Teenage Witches	2007	the path around The Craft (1996) and Teen Witch (1998)
37	The Witches’ Voice (Witchvox) archived site history	1997–2019	a noticeboard with the scale of a denomination and no members
38	Peter Brierley’s UK church statistics, as used by Brown	endpoints c. 1900 and 1990s	Sunday-school enrolment from about half of children to a few per cent
39	Church of Sweden membership rules	1996; disestablishment 1 January 2000	membership-by-birth ended on a dated statute
40	Aidan A. Kelly, Crafting the Art of Magic / Inventing Witchcraft	1991; 2007	stratigraphy of the Book of Shadows and “Ye Bok of ye Art Magical”
41	Starhawk, The Spiral Dance	1979	the trade-list book that functions as scripture for Reclaiming
42	Religious Requirements and Practices of Certain Selected Groups: A Handbook for Chaplains	1978	the 1974 Principles reprinted as a government field guide
43	Pentagram report of Valiente’s speech	1964	first documented public attestation of the Wiccan Rede
44	Pew Research Center, Religious 'Nones’ in America	24 January 2024	70 per cent of US nones name God or a higher power
45	Pew Research Center, 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study	2023–24	unaffiliated 29 per cent of US adults: 5 / 6 / 19
46	Pew Research Center, Measuring Religion in China	August 2023	10 per cent identify; 33 per cent Buddha/bodhisattvas; 75 per cent gravesite
47	Pew Research Center, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed 2010–2020	9 June 2025	unaffiliated 1.9 billion in 2020, third largest
48	ONS, Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021	2021	no religion 37.2 per cent; Pagan 74,000; Wicca 13,000
49	National Records of Scotland, 2022 census	2022	“no religion” 51.1 per cent on a belonging wording
50	ARIS/NSRI reports (Kosmin and Keysar)	1990; 2001; 2008	self-identified Wiccans about 8,000 / 134,000 / 342,000
51	Dettmer v. Landon, 799 F.2d 929 (4th Cir.)	1986	Wicca treated as a religion for First Amendment purposes
52	VA pentacle settlement, Circle Sanctuary litigation	23 April 2007	pentacle added to emblems of belief for government headstones
53	Charity Commission registration of The Druid Network	2010	religion without a single god met the Commission’s tests
54	Gallup, “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time”	29 March 2021	47 per cent in 2020; 70 per cent in 1999; 73 per cent in 1937
55	Church of England, Statistics for Mission	published annually	usual Sunday attendance falling in the church’s own tables
56	Giving USA annual reports	series as cited	religion’s shrinking share of US charitable giving
57	Church Times (February 2020) and Second Church Estates Commissioner decade totals	2020; 2025	about two thousand closures since 1969; 760/485/274/243/210 then the 2020s
58	Church Commissioners’ endowment announcement	end-2024 figure, 2025	fund valued at £11.1 billion
59	German Bishops’ Conference and EKD published statistics	2022	522,821 Catholic exits; 380,227 EKD exits
60	Circle Sanctuary (1974) and Covenant of the Goddess (1975) Form 990s; Pagan Spirit Gathering; PantheaCon	1980; 1994–2020	public charity fragments; festival spans; no Craft total
61	Registers Iceland / Statistics Iceland, Ásatrúarfélagið series	1973–2025	58 at recognition; 6,250 in 2025
62	Vísir and Icelandic press on Zuism	November 2015	registration spike into the low thousands; later court outcome UNVERIFIED
63	June Johns, King of the Witches	1969	the Sanders publicity machine
64	Stewart Farrar, What Witches Do	1971	the book that named the Alexandrian line
65	Jone Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco	2002	Reclaiming ethnography from 1979
66	Declaration 127, Huginn’s Heathen Hof	August 2016	public disassociation from the AFA, named for Hávamál 127
67	Benjamin Thorpe, Edda of Sæmund, and Olive Bray, Elder or Poetic Edda	1866; 1908	public-domain Hávamál counsel later numbered 127
68	Jennifer Snook, American Heathens	2015	ordinary American Heathen practice and the fight over who is for
69	Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood	2003	the racial-religious right’s use of the northern gods

Common questions

When is The Unaffiliated first securely attested?

1951. That is the earliest date the surviving evidence supports, and it is the key this volume is filed under. It is not the same claim as when the tradition began: the tradition’s own account of its beginning is printed beside it in the book’s front matter, never instead of it.

What period does the book cover?

1951 onward. The coverage span and the attestation date are two different facts, and the gap between them is often the most interesting thing about a volume.

What carried The Unaffiliated?

The paperback that replaced the coven. Movement Two of every volume is about the transmission technology — the concrete object or institution that made copying possible, and would not have existed a century earlier.

How long is it?

About 29,000 words, roughly 120 minutes’ reading. The audiobook runs 2h 58m, measured from the existing audio files.

What does this volume not claim to establish?

Whether any witch religion existed in the New Forest before Gardner described one. This is the volume’s signature limit and it is stated inside Movement One, not saved for a coda. The record shows that Dorothy Clutterbuck existed — Valiente’s document search in the 1980s and Heselton’s archival work found the registers and the will — and that her surviving notebooks record a conventional churchgoing life; whether she, or anyone, initiated Gardner in 1939 cannot be established. Heselton’s circumstantial case for a pre-existing esoteric milieu in Highcliffe and Hutton’s caution are both named, and neither is adjudicated. The series has spent thirty volumes on the gap between a tradition’s account of its origin and the earliest evidence for it; in its youngest tradition the gap is fifteen years wide, and it is still a gap. Every volume prints its own limits before it prints its argument; there are 7 on this one’s list.

Does the book say which tradition is true?

No. Belief System does not adjudicate. Where the tradition’s account and the earliest evidence disagree, both are given, in their own vocabulary, attributed, and neither is given the last word. No miracle is reported as fact and none is denied.

Can I buy The Unaffiliated in print?

Ordering is currently closed. Explore the chapter outlines, sources and historical questions here while book purchasing is unavailable.

The edition

Editions and ISBNs
Edition	Extent	ISBN
Ebook	EPUB	979-8-90623-873-3
Audiobook	2h 58m	979-8-90623-874-0

Filed under
BISAC 1	`REL017000` RELIGION / Comparative Religion
BISAC 2	`REL117000` RELIGION / Paganism & Modern Paganism
BISAC 3	`REL033000` RELIGION / History

nones
unaffiliated
Wicca
Gardner
Pew
Witchcraft Act
history of religion
pagan revival
secularisation
comparative religion