A critical article in The Atlantic (back in 2001), which I'm linking here for posterity.

Key points:

* Like Science Fiction is regarding the future, the story of Wicca is false history which was based on modern faddish misconceptions, not actual events and facts. "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..."

* Despite what luminaries like Al "Earth in the Balance" Gore tell us, old-time pagans were NOT monotheistic "goddess" worshipers, but were, in fact, genuine polytheists. "They did not believe that the many gods and goddesses they worshipped merely represented different aspects of single deities." (Monotheism has truly won, hasn't it?)

* Lurid stories of persecuted pagans are also generally bunk, as expected:

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.

* And, speaking of wanting to cash in on a winning formula:

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."

Similarly, it's not surprising that the creators of Wicca also wanted to turn the tables and present Christianity as a pale imitation of their purportedly much-older belief system:

Hutton effectively demolished the notion, held by Wiccans and others, that fundamentally pagan ancient customs existed beneath medieval Christian practices. His research reveals that outside of a handful of traditions, such as decorating with greenery at Yuletide and celebrating May Day with flowers, no pagan practices -- much less the veneration of pagan gods -- have survived from antiquity. Hutton found that nearly all the rural seasonal pastimes that folklorists once viewed as "timeless" fertility rituals, including the Maypole dance, actually date from the Middle Ages or even the eighteenth century....

"The equinoxes seem to have no native pagan festivals behind them and became significant only to occultists in the nineteenth century," Hutton told me. "There is still no proven pagan feast that stood as ancestor to Easter" -- a festival that modern pagans celebrate as Ostara, the vernal equinox.

The archaeological aspect of the article is interesting too, especially the bits about how a "peaceful" ancient pagan civilization later turned out to be rather violent ("It's ludicrous. Neolithic settlements were not utopias in any sense at all"), and how the "goddess" statues found there seem, in retrospect, to have been dolls or perhaps mere charms rather than objects of worship.

But all those ideas were in vogue when Wicca was created, so they survive in a snapshot of a past that never was, much like The Jetsons are reflection of their own time (the early sixties) rather than an authentic glimpse into the future.