In the 1950s, Gerald Gardener developed Wicca. His ideas were drawn in part from Crowley's Thelema - a ceremonial/high magic path, drawn in turn from Freemasonry and the Order of the Golden Dawn. Part, he claimed, was based on genuine rituals by the New Forest Coven - who he claimed were a surviving witch coven. Margarey Murray was a very strong influence - her two books, the Witch Cult in Western Europe and The God Of The Witches, lead to the development of the God and the Goddess respectively. Another key text to understand Wicca is the White Goddess by Robert Graves, which develops Murray's idea of one pan-cultural fertility goddess, whose power was usurped by patriarchal God religions.
Murray's books are brilliant and flawed. They draw together a lot of research, archeology, and fascinating theories - but come to all the wrong conclusions. The way we understand gender in ritual are modern inventions which tell us more about Crowley, Murray and Gardener, than the craft of the ancient wise. That craft was messy, complex, had no real universal secrets or messages - and it was fiercely local. Perhaps some of those involved roles for men and for women, reproductive imagery or sexual rites. But it is ahistorical to generalise those ideas, and fit all the myths and legends of gods and spirits into that gendered framework. It's also flawed to link Cerunnos, the witch trials, Robin Hood and the great god Pan into a single God.
His interpretations of Murray, British magical heritage and our myths and legends would have been very, very different. He certainly wouldn't have been dipping no athames in no chalices.
Wicca was the beginning of a particular New Age pathway, which sought to reconstruct witchcraft using folklore and earth imagery. It has many descendent faiths, but has never really escaped Gardener's initial use of gender. If you go hunting for witchcraft traditions nowadays, you'll be hard pressed to find any which don't - on some level - assume that the pick'n'mix of human cultures all express a single cultural truth, a truth that inevitably has something to do with the vagina.
Landcrafting is a new development in this tradition. It's a parallel universe Wicca, using the same sources to come to different conclusions. In the family tree, it'd be more of sibling than a descendent. It's what Gardener might have created, had he been uncomfortable with his body, uncomfortable with sex generally, or heterosexuality in particular.
I read all these authors in search for an authentic, earthy witchcraft linked strongly to myth and folklore - but without imposed frameworks such as The God And The Goddess, or The Five Elements. I didn't find one. All generations claim to have found "the true witchcraft", and Landcrafting is no different. It aims to provide a sort of structure for you to rummage through the magical history of Britain - or the land where you live - without adding too much extra "stuff". It seeks to get closer to the original source material than both Fairy Wicca and Feri, while recognising that we can never reconstruct the past on the evidence we have. It certainly assumes there is a mystery and magic at the heart of British folklore - but doesn't rush to put labels on what that is. It views all the possible old gods of Britain as separate (rather than manifestations of one God or Goddess), and allows the worshipper to approach them all side by side - while remaining open that some of these gods may turn out to be manifestations of the same Powers.
Like Gardener and Murray, Landcrafting reconstructs something that never actually existed - the sort of ancient witchcraft in the popcultural imagination. We just do it better than they did.
I literally made it up in 45 minutes on the bus.