You can call it whatever you feel best fits, however, it would have to become a community wide term. Otherwise it is merely UPG (Universal Personal Gnoses) and will not be a fact seen in the community.
There has been an increase in Wiccans, I believe it began with Scott Cunningham, but do not quote me, calling themselves "solitaries." His view was "if you need to be initiated to become a witch, who initiated the first witch?" Which he makes a fine point, the issue is, too many people grab one book and claim to be an expert. I have no problem with solitary practitioners of any path. Your spirituality is person. BTW is a set religion with traditions and level based wisdom to be granted when you are ready for it. It is not gate-keeping, it is similar to Catholicism or any major religion with set rules and hierarchy. As you practice, you will be granted deeper understanding. The reason it is fine in other main stream religions but the Pagan community gets angry when a religion says "you must study and prove yourself in a year" is considered wrong baffles me.
You can connect with the God and Goddess, practice the religion daily, and call yourself Wiccan. However, if the path has a specific rule that you need to be taught by an initiated member to call yourself, say, British Traditionalist, you need to respect that. You can still be Solitary, or any other "insert title here" Wiccan, but the more sacred ceremonies will be unknown to you because it is knowledge not shared outside of the circle. Those with knowledge of them have proven themselves trustworthy. That is why you need to wait a year or more.
Hey Tadashi, in regards to the question "Who initiated the first Witch? there are two answers.
1. Most Witches practice an art which does not require initiation. That is different from Wicca.
2. As to who initiated the first Wiccan, that would be Gerald Gardner as the coven into which he, himself, was initiated was not a Wiccan coven. Wicca began with Gardner.
"I prefer Neo-Wicca as many who practice it are not solitaries. There are plenty of Neo-Wiccan covens out there."
If the presence or absence of covens is not the decisive factor to you, then what is it?
And don't tell me that it's just the presence or absence of lineage to Gerald Gardner. Various people have published enough information about Gardnerian Wicca to allow people to create wiccan covens that are identical in practice to the original Gardnerian ones. If some people independently create such an orthopraxic coven (which they might do, due to the absence of a Gardner-lineaged BTW coven in their area), then the absence of such lineage would be too trivial a distinction to call it a separate religion.
As for differences in practice, I know that Alex Sanders deviated from orthopraxy early on, by making nudity optional rather than mandatory, and by calling the goddess Cerridwen in the liturgy, but those deviations were evidently not enough to consider Alexandrian Wicca to be Neo-Wicca. If the distinction that you make is not merely the presence or absence of lineage to Gardner, then what are the practices that distinguish neo-wiccan covens from wiccan covens?
Well, it won't make you happy, but what distinguishes British Traditional Wicca from Neo-Wicca is that important initiatory lineage back to Gerald Gardner.
Yes, there are lots of things out there that purport to be drawn directly from Gardnerian teachings. Trust me there are not. And even if they were it is not the whole of BTW beliefs and practices. Much of that is contained in oral teachings only and passed directly from teacher to student after initiation. Even if you had an actual Gardnerian Book of Shadows you would have an incomplete knowledge of what Gardnerian Wicca is all about. And more importantly you would not be connected to the Tradition's egregore which is passed down during the initiation ritual.
There are a number of offshoots of Gardnerian Wicca including Alexandrian, Silver Crescent, Central Valley, etc. They are considered BTW because and only because they trace an initiatory lineage directly back to Gerald Gardner.
Most older generation Neo-Wiccans, especially those in more structured covens and Traditions such as the one in which I initially trained, trace their practices back to The Pagan Way , which was a bunch of outer court teachings put together by a Gardnerian coven in Chicago for the benefit of those who wanted to be Pagan, but who were not wishing to become British Traditional Wiccans. Much of this material was eventually published in the book " Rites From The Crystal Well" by Ed Fitch. None of this material was drawn from the oath-bound material of British Traditional Wicca.
