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Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca

Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca · Chapter VII: Wicca

Dettmer v. Landon (1986): When a US Court Recognised Wicca

Dettmer v. Landon (1986) explained: the Virginia prisoner case in which a US appeals court accepted Wicca as a religion, its limits, context and legacy.

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Dettmer v. Landon is the 1986 decision in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit accepted that the Church of Wicca was a religion protected by the First Amendment. The case was brought by a Virginia prisoner who had been refused ritual objects; he lost on the objects but won on the principle, and the ruling has been cited ever since as an early landmark in the legal recognition of modern witchcraft. On the site's timeline it shares the year 1986 with another milestone, Hans Dieter Betz's English translation of the Greek magical papyri.

The Case: Herbert Dettmer and the Church of Wicca§

Dettmer was serving a sentence in a Virginia correctional institution in the early 1980s when he began to study and practise witchcraft through the Church of Wicca, an organisation founded by Gavin and Yvonne Frost, whose correspondence courses and book The Witch's Bible (1972) reached many people who had no local coven. The Frosts' teaching differed in several respects from the British Gardnerian tradition described in Wicca and Gerald Gardner, but it shared the core pattern of seasonal and lunar rites, a ritual circle and a reverence for divine powers of nature.

Dettmer asked prison officials for a set of objects he described as necessary for his devotions: a white robe without a hood, sea salt or sulphur to mark out a protective circle, candles, incense, a small statue of a goddess and a kitchen timer to measure the length of his rites. The officials refused, citing institutional rules and the risks posed by some of the items. Dettmer then filed a civil rights suit claiming that the refusal violated his right to the free exercise of religion.

From the District Court to the Fourth Circuit§

The first question any court had to answer was whether Wicca counted as a religion at all. American courts had long avoided defining religion narrowly, and earlier cases had developed broad tests that asked whether a set of beliefs addressed ultimate questions about life and death, formed a comprehensive system rather than an isolated teaching, and showed outward signs of a religion such as ceremonies, holidays, organisation and clergy.

In 1985 the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia applied this kind of analysis and concluded that the Church of Wicca met it. The court examined the group's beliefs about deity, nature and ethics, its calendar of observances and its organised structure, and found them comparable in function to those of more familiar faiths. It went on to grant Dettmer part of what he asked for.

The state appealed. In 1986 the Fourth Circuit agreed with the lower court on the central point: the Church of Wicca was a religion, its doctrines occupying in the lives of its members a place parallel to that held by belief in God among adherents of more conventional religions. The court stressed that the sincerity of Dettmer's belief was not in question and that unfamiliarity or public disapproval could not decide whether a faith deserved protection.

What the Court Decided — and What It Did Not§

On the practical question the appeals court reversed. It held that prison officials were entitled to give substantial weight to security. Sulphur could be used to make explosive or incendiary mixtures; a hooded or loose robe could hide identity or contraband; a timer could be adapted to other purposes; candles and incense raised fire and contraband concerns. Because the prison applied the same rules to inmates of other faiths, and because Dettmer was not prevented from studying and practising in other ways, the court concluded that the restrictions were reasonable.

The result was therefore double-edged. As a matter of status, a federal appellate court had said in plain terms that Wicca qualifies as a religion. As a matter of practice, prisons retained wide discretion to limit ritual materials. Both halves of the decision were cited in later disputes, and the case is often summarised incorrectly as a total victory for Dettmer.

The decision also did not create any kind of official registry. In the United States, governments do not license religions; recognition comes piecemeal, through court decisions, tax rulings and the policies of agencies such as prisons and the armed forces. The Frosts' organisation had reportedly already obtained federal tax-exempt status in the early 1970s, and other Wiccan and Pagan bodies would follow.

Wicca in America in the 1980s§

The case came at a sensitive moment. Wicca had grown rapidly in the United States since the late 1960s through books, festivals and feminist spirituality, and Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon (1979) had given the movement a sympathetic public account. At the same time many Americans associated the word "witch" with Satanism and harm.

In 1985 Senator Jesse Helms proposed an amendment to deny tax exemption to any organisation that promoted witchcraft; it attracted publicity but did not become law. The mid-1980s also saw the beginning of the Satanic panic, in which allegations of ritual abuse spread through the media, the courts and child-protection services, later found by investigators to lack supporting evidence. Wiccans were frequently confused with the imagined satanic cults. Against this background, a reasoned federal ruling treating Wicca as a religion on its own terms was significant for practitioners, even if few outside the movement noticed it.

The Same Year in Scholarship: Betz's Greek Magical Papyri§

The year 1986 also marked a turning point in the scholarly study of magic. The University of Chicago Press published The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells, edited by the New Testament scholar Hans Dieter Betz, which put into English, for the first time as a whole, the spell books of Greco-Roman Egypt previously available only in Karl Preisendanz's Greek edition of 1928–31.

The translation, prepared by a team of classicists and Egyptologists, transformed the field. It made the papyri usable for historians of religion who did not read Greek or Demotic, fed a wave of new research on curse tablets, amulets and ritual power in the 1990s, and encouraged scholars to question the old opposition between "religion" and "magic". It was also read outside the academy: modern ceremonial magicians and reconstructionist practitioners drew on its invocations, and its availability helped make Greco-Egyptian material a recognisable strand of contemporary occultism. The papyri themselves are described in the Greek Magical Papyri.

The two events of 1986 are unrelated in origin, but together they illustrate a broader change: magic and witchcraft were becoming subjects of serious scholarly study and, for their modern practitioners, matters of legal rights rather than only of suspicion.

Legacy: Prisons, the Military and the Pentacle§

Later decisions repeatedly cited Dettmer when the religious status of Wicca was disputed. Prison chaplaincies gradually developed policies for Wiccan and Pagan inmates, and in 2005 the Supreme Court in Cutter v. Wilkinson upheld a federal law protecting prisoners' religious exercise in a case brought by inmates who included adherents of Wicca, Asatru and Satanism. The United States armed forces had already included Wicca in chaplains' reference handbooks, and open circles were held on military bases, sometimes amid political controversy, as at Fort Hood in 1999.

In 2007 a legal settlement led the Department of Veterans Affairs to add the pentacle to the emblems of belief permitted on government-issued headstones for veterans. Not every case has gone the Pagans' way — in 2005 the Fourth Circuit, the same court that decided Dettmer, upheld a Virginia county's refusal to include a Wiccan among those offering invocations at its meetings — but the basic question of whether Wicca is a religion has rarely been reopened. For historians of new religious movements, Dettmer v. Landon marks the point at which a modern witchcraft religion entered American law as a faith rather than a superstition.

Frequently asked questions§

Is Wicca legally recognised as a religion in the United States?§

Yes, in the sense that courts and federal agencies have treated it as a religion entitled to constitutional protection. Dettmer v. Landon (1986) is the best-known early appellate decision, and later cases and agency policies have followed it.

Did Herbert Dettmer win his case?§

Partly. The courts accepted that the Church of Wicca was a religion, but the Fourth Circuit ruled that the prison could refuse the specific items he requested, such as sulphur, a timer and a hooded robe, for security reasons.

What was the Church of Wicca?§

It was an organisation founded by Gavin and Yvonne Frost that taught witchcraft through correspondence courses and publications. Its tradition differed in several ways from British Gardnerian Wicca, but it was one of the most visible Wiccan bodies in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.

Why is the Betz translation linked to 1986 as well?§

Hans Dieter Betz's English translation of the Greek magical papyri appeared in 1986. It is unrelated to the court case, but it marks the same year as a turning point in the study of ancient magic.

Sources and further reading§