"Witchcraft" isn't one practice but a family of them, often with little in common besides the name. What follows is how the major branches actually differ — in structure, in belief, and in how you'd enter each one.
Formalized in England in the mid-20th century by Gerald Gardner, later branching into Alexandrian and other lines. Duotheistic (God and Goddess), oath-bound, and structured around covens, degrees, and the Wheel of the Year.
Entry: traditionally by initiation into a coven, though many self-initiate as solitary Wiccans today.
Practices passed down within a family or regional lineage, often undocumented and locally specific — closer to inherited folk custom than to a codified system, and rarely uniform between households.
Entry: by birth or close family teaching; not generally open to outsiders by design.
The most common practice today: individuals drawing from multiple traditions, folklore, and personal experimentation without formal initiation, assembling a practice to fit their own life and belief.
Entry: self-directed, no gatekeeping — which is also its main criticism from more structured traditions.
Centered on herbalism, cooking, and the home — magic worked through everyday domestic acts, plant knowledge, and a cultivated relationship with a local landscape rather than formal ritual.
Entry: self-taught, often growing out of an existing interest in gardening or herbalism.
Named for the "hedge" as a boundary between worlds. Focused on trance work, spirit contact, and journeying between ordinary and non-ordinary reality — closer to shamanic practice than coven-based ritual.
Entry: solitary by nature; skill-based rather than lineage-based.
A looser umbrella for practices drawing on pre-Wiccan British and European folk magic, cunning-folk practice, and grimoire tradition — deliberately distanced from Wicca's 20th-century structure.
Entry: varies widely by lineage; some groups initiate, others are text-based and self-taught.
These come up often enough in conversation that it's worth being able to place them.
A Wiccan lineage founded by Alex and Maxine Sanders in the 1960s, broadly similar to Gardnerian Wicca but with its own initiatory line and ritual variations.
Founded by Victor and Cora Anderson, an initiatory tradition distinct from Wicca — ecstatic, poetic, and centered on direct personal gnosis rather than a fixed liturgy.
Named for Robert Cochrane, a mid-20th-century English practitioner who positioned his "1734 Tradition" in explicit contrast to Gardnerian Wicca, favoring poetic, mystery-based ritual.
Founded in San Francisco in the 1980s, blending Feri-derived practice with feminist and activist politics, and organized around collective ritual rather than hierarchical coven structure.
A Goddess-centered, often women-only branch founded by Zsuzsanna Budapest in the 1970s, focused on female divinity and, in many groups, feminist spirituality.
A modern reconstruction of Italian folk-magic practice, popularized in the 1990s and drawing on (and disputed in its claims to) older Italian witchcraft traditions.