The Religious Biographies of Polish Traditional Wiccans Leaving the Catholic Church, Conversion to Wicca, and the “Coming Home” Metaphor

The article examines the religious biographies of Polish Traditional Wiccans in three aspects: leaving their first religious formation (in most cases, Roman Catholicism, the dominant religion in Poland), initiation to Wicca and the significance of the “coming home” metaphor. The gathered source material comes from field research: participant observation combined with semi-structured interviews with thirty-one respondents (half of the whole Wiccan milieu at the time of research). The Rambo and Farhadian seven-step model was used to analyze the conversion process and the Streib, Hood Jr. and Keller typology with Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s “religion in movement” to analyze the deconversion process. Three categories of reasons for leaving the Church are distinguished, five categories of reasons for choosing Wicca follow. The “coming home” metaphor proved to be a well-known and important motive in the respondents’ narratives.