My 50-cent back story:
Traditionally British witchcraft Gardnerian-Style Wica (one "C") blended traditions that were dying out & framed it in a Western Occult format. In the late 1940''s Wica was begun as an initiatory, lineage-by-founder, coven based religion, & many seek to keep it that way for reasons of the structure & training. And by the 1980s Scott Cunningham recognized there were a lot more seekers in the US than covens could accommodate & his book
Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner opened the door. He kept the structure based in Western Occultism. By the '90's eclecticism added shamanistic practices & folk magic of many cultures.
Recall that In the '50's there were no organized books in public domain that taught "witchcraft" & the '60's-70's brought a hodgepodge of related anthropology studies. Paul Huson published his
Mastering Witchcraft book (1970) which is ceremonial Craft based. Coven trained meant oath bound. In the US, August 13, 1971, Lady Sheba, claiming Lineage as an Alexandrian priestess, broke tradition & established Wicca as a legally recognized religion & "shockingly" printed her Grimoire. Gardnerian trained Raymond Buckland established Wiccan covens in the US & printed his "Big Blue" training book (2001). So-o, once the cat was out of the bag it will never return.
To engage in a religion requires a community. To live a spiritual practice denotes solitaire. Just
IMO it's up to the individual as a solitary Witch-Crafter to seek within their means the most suitable info & practices & to train themselves at their own pace & to responsibly intuit out the core of their own path, then claim what label they will.
Edit: now in the 21st C, the term "Wicca" has morphed into a broadly inclusive set of shifting eclectic practices as a path, so much so that the term "traditional" needs to be added on to
indicate the coven-style training & ritual practice as being structured differently from the popular, solitaire eclectic Wiccan practice.
Solitaire Wiccan has become accepted as a qualifier.
Edit: I've gone back checked & corrected reference to publication dates. Memory compression had occurred
