"A creative backstory..."

In the course of a report on the reporting of the Veterans Administration decision to allow Wiccan symbols in national cemeteries - a decision hailed by Americans United as a triumph of religious liberty - GetReligion notes that press reports accept at face value the invented history of Wicca:

Mark Oppenheimer, the holder of a Ph.D. in American religious history from Yale University, writes over at The Huffington Post that Banerjee makes a mistake in his report when he says that Wicca is a pre-Christian belief “that reveres nature and its cycles.” Oppenheimer says that “Wicca is a 19th- and 20th-century invention with a creative backstory invented to lend it historical legitimacy.”

First, this myth is tied closely to what the scholar Cynthia Eller calls “the myth of matriarchal prehistory,” the notion that thousands of years ago the world was ruled by peaceful, matriarchal goddess cults (from whom many Wiccans claim spiritual descent). Would that it were true, but it’s not, and too many well-meaning history teachers have bought into this bad, biased history in the interests of multiculturalism and progressivism.

Second, the prevalence of the ancient-Wicca myth is testament in part to the decline of religion journalism. ....

Oppenheimer links to a story at The Atlantic by Charlotte Allen titled "The Scholars and the Goddess" about the origins of Wicca. After summarizing Wiccan beliefs, Allen observes:

In all probability, not a single element of the Wiccan story is true. The evidence is overwhelming that Wicca is a distinctly new religion, a 1950s concoction influenced by such things as Masonic ritual and a late-nineteenth-century fascination with the esoteric and the occult, and that various assumptions informing the Wiccan view of history are deeply flawed. Furthermore, scholars generally agree that there is no indication, either archaeological or in the written record, that any ancient people ever worshipped a single, archetypal goddess - a conclusion that strikes at the heart of Wiccan belief.

After describing the scholarship on the subject, Allen comments on why "Wicca is thriving despite all the things about it that look like hokum":

...it gives its practitioners a sense of connection to the natural world and of access to the sacred and beautiful within their own bodies. I am hardly the first to notice that Wicca bears a striking resemblance to another religion -- one that also tells of a dying and rising god, that venerates a figure who is both virgin and mother, that keeps, in its own way, the seasonal "feasts of the Wheel," that uses chalices and candles and sacred poetry in its rituals. Practicing Wicca is a way to have Christianity without, well, the burdens of Christianity. "It has the advantages of both Catholicism and Unitarianism," observes Allen Stairs, a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in religion and magic. "Wicca allows one to wear one's beliefs lightly but also to have a rich and imaginative religious life."

Sources: GetReligion: Pagan symbol battle gets political » GetReligion, The Atlantic: The Scholars and the Goddess