In a post below, questions have been raised about the DVC claim about millions and millions of women being burned as witches, etc.

As I understand it, this claim does make its way into the film, so here’s the truth:

The best single article – good for forwarding – debunking modern Wiccan claims of the antiquity of their movement and their mass persecution was published in The Atlantic in 2001, and was written by friend o’ this blog, Charlotte Allen.

Historians have overturned another basic Wiccan assumption: that the group has a history of persecution exceeding even that of the Jews. The figure Starhawk cited — nine million executed over four centuries — derives from a late-eighteenth-century German historian; it was picked up and disseminated a hundred years later by a British feminist named Matilda Gage and quickly became Wiccan gospel (Gardner himself coined the phrase "the Burning Times"). Most scholars today believe that the actual number of executions is in the neighborhood of 40,000. The most thorough recent study of historical witchcraft is Witches and Neighbors (1996), by Robin Briggs, a historian at Oxford University. Briggs pored over the documents of European witch trials and concluded that most of them took place during a relatively short period, 1550 to 1630, and were largely confined to parts of present-day France, Switzerland, and Germany that were already racked by the religious and political turmoil of the Reformation. The accused witches, far from including a large number of independent-minded women, were mostly poor and unpopular. Their accusers were typically ordinary citizens (often other women), not clerical or secular authorities. In fact, the authorities generally disliked trying witchcraft cases and acquitted more than half of all defendants. Briggs also discovered that none of the accused witches who were found guilty and put to death had been charged specifically with practicing a pagan religion. 

If Internet chat rooms are any indication, some Wiccans cling tenaciously to the idea of themselves as institutional victims on a large scale. Generally speaking, though, Wiccans appear to be accommodating themselves to much of the emerging evidence concerning their antecedents: for example, they are coming to view their ancient provenance as inspiring legend rather than hard-and-fast history. By the end of the 1990s, with the appearance of Davis’s book and then of Hutton’s, many Wiccans had begun referring to their story as a myth of origin, not a history of survival. "We don’t do what Witches did a hundred years ago, or five hundred years ago, or five thousand years ago," Starhawk told me. "We’re not an unbroken tradition like the Native Americans." In fact, many Wiccans now describe those who take certain elements of the movement’s narrative literally as "Wiccan fundamentalists." 

A link to Witches and Neighbors