The reviews published in specialist academic journals were largely negative, and while accepting that Orion had made note of some interesting insights, they criticized her for promoting and defending, rather than analyzing, the religious movement that she was discussing, something that they attributed to her openly Pagan beliefs.

Gardnerian Wicca revolved around the veneration of both a Horned God and a Mother Goddess, the celebration of eight seasonally-based festivals in a Wheel of the Year and the practice of magical rituals in groups known as covens.

One initiate of both the Dianic and Gardnerian traditions was a woman known as Starhawk (1951–) who went on to found her own tradition, Reclaiming Wicca, as well as publishing The Spiral Dance: a Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979), a book which helped spread Wicca throughout the U.S.[5][6] Prior to Berger's work, several American researchers working in the field of Pagan studies had separately published investigations of the Pagan community in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

The first of these had been the practicing Wiccan, journalist and political activist Margot Adler in her Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, which was first published by Viking Press in 1979.

"[9] The anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann (1959–) of the University of California, San Diego – who had previously authored Persuasions of the Witches' Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (1989) – also published a predominantly negative review of the book, this time in the Journal of Anthropological Research, in which she also reviewed another study of Wicca that had been published in the mid-1990s, Allen Scarboro, Nancy Campbell and Shirley Stave's Living Witchcraft: A Contemporary American Coven.