 In his book The Meaning of Witchcraft ( 1959 ) Gardner states that he first heard the term Wica while being initiated into the New Forest coven in September 1939 , stating that " I realised I had stumbled on something interesting ; but I was half @-@ initiated before the word Wica which they used hit me like a <unk> , and I knew where I was , and that the Old Religion still existed . " This account was repeated in his biography , Gerald Gardner : Witch ( 1960 ) , written by <unk> Shah but attributed to Jack L. <unk> , in which he is quoted as saying that " it was halfway through when the word Wica was first mentioned ; and I knew that that which I had thought burnt out hundreds of years ago still survived . " If Gardner 's account was accurate and the New Forest coven had really existed , then the fact that Gardner spelled the word as Wica would not necessarily indicate that the coven members had spelled it the same way . As he relates , from Gardner 's account , " it seems that he had heard rather than read the word in the midst of his <unk> rite " and that , " suffering from a poor grasp of spelling , punctuation , and grammar , something caused by the fact that he was self @-@ educated and possibly also influenced by <unk> " , he would have therefore spelled the word <unk> as Wica . 
